Developing and leveraging client alumni portals cost-effectively produces reliable quality talent pools for business organizations and their MSP/RPO workforce service provider.  After decades of aggressive, successful implementations of disintermediation strategies, it makes perfect sense to access known talent pools now willing to engage in new, flexible employment arrangements.  Why only use traditional talent acquisition value chains when cost-effective and sometimes more reliable and flexible alternatives are available by leveraging an organization’s proven human network and business community.

A vast amount of research indicates that the American workforce has changed resulting in a rise of independent, career-minded workers which is driving significant implications for the U.S. employer.  SFN Group’s Emerging Workforce Study took an in-depth look at employee motivations, expectations and their viewpoints on success and failure, and further explored the divergent aspects of the “emergent”, independent workforce compared to the traditional “job-security focused” worker.  This research has consistently found a growing segment of “emergent” independent workers who seek a new and different employment compact. (Info link: http://spherion.mediaroom.com/pressroom/index.php?s=41)

Concurrently, it’s no secret that we can’t keep all of our employees forever so the opportunity then becomes how we maintain a long-term affiliation with them.  Staying connected to former employees is a low cost, high value opportunity for a variety of reasons including:

• Reengagement potential of known and proven alumni talent
• Maintaining a competitive edge by tapping into flexible working arrangements for full time and/or “project” based needs and requirements
• Direct “disintermediation” reduction in talent acquisition sourcing costs and time to a productive engagement
• Further cost reductions with on-boarding, job-training, production start-up and other general assimilation costs when engaging alumni workers
• Reduction in disengagement, off-boarding expenses
• Tapping into and leveraging the alumni’s referral network
• Corporate ambassadorship (spreading the goodwill, maintaining the corporate image/reputation)  

Alumni Resource Centers are a great way to optimize your relationship with your alumni talent. The deployment of a company branded Alumni Resource Center portal allows your SourceRight staffing service recruiters to mine a proven talent pool of high quality engaged “boomerangs” (returning alumni talent). The result is faster time to fill/hiring periods of high quality, proven, known talent with cost effective talent acquisition and engagement.

Incidentally, Alumni Portal/Resource Centers are being established by many business organizations with the outsourcing of the entire deployment and management of the Alumni Resource Center program…..from managing the program’s content relevance and the building of the talent pool, to managing job postings and matching the candidates to the actual jobs/projects, etc… This allows the organization to focus on running their own business with the right talent at the right time for the right costs.