When push comes to shove, where do alumni loyalties lie?

By Alison Huntington

Every year we survey thousands of senior end-users of consulting around the world, and a hefty proportion of those clients (27%) are former consultants themselves. For consulting firms, this network is incredibly important in spreading tentacles into new client organisations and winning future work. Our research has also shown that alumni are more likely to be champions of the value added by their former employer, far more so than prospective clients who know a firm by reputation or advertising, though they’re still less likely than a firm’s long-standing clients to recommend their alma mater.

Along with questions about value, quality, and whether they’d recommend the firm, we also asked people if their former employer would be their first choice of firm to work with; a question that’s important because it effectively puts them on the spot. Willing to recommend? Yes. First choice firm? Maybe, but maybe not. 

The chart below shows the proportion of alumni for each firm we asked about who said that their former employer was now their first choice firm. We’ve hidden the firm names but colour coded each firm by its type.

The first point that jumps out is that some firms are doing a much better job of keeping their alum networks engaged. One technology firm has nearly two thirds of its leavers saying it’s their preferred firm, while one Big Four firm only musters 42%.

The second is that the distribution by firm type varies. Strategy firms do what we might expect: some perform very well, but some much less so, from which we’d infer that what they’re doing with their alumni programme makes a real difference. Technology firms, however, appear to be more successful with their alums as a group, and that’s faintly ironic given that they tend to have less well developed alumni programmes than strategy firms. Perhaps it’s not what technology firms do, where their alumni are concerned, but who they are in the first place that matter most. Perhaps good technology work is seen to depend on specialist skills, and those are easier to appreciate if you’ve actually worked somewhere.

By contrast, former employees of Big Four firms appear to have much less of a tendency to call on their alma mater for help. All are very clearly bunched at the bottom of our scale, implying that whatever these firms do to engage alumni, there’s something else hampering their chances of being chosen. Is it the fact that someone who’s worked for one Big Four firm is likely to have worked for others? (This is less true where strategy firms are concerned, for example.) In other words, it’s not just clients that often struggle to say what’s different about these firms, but ex-employees too.