Tang, herself a Cornell grad, is among the many entrepreneurs who use the Internet as a prospecting tool. In the past, recruiting networks were limited: job leads might spread by word of mouth at a class reunion or occasional club meetings. The colleges’ own alumni directories were often outdated. Alumni associations and career centers at the top schools weren’t efficient for job searches.
Now a new breed of Web sites–some commercial, some not–allows employers to find the Ivy Leaguers they covet. TheSquare.com, for example, an online community whose members post resumes and other personal information, also has a career center where employers advertise openings. Some of these services are free for employers, others require fees–but all are cheaper? and can be faster than hiring an executive recruiter. At the same time alumni associations and career-services programs at top schools have also begun to wise up and are creating their own online services. “I think the Internet has changed things dramatically,” says Marilyn Kohn, associate dean for external relations and development at Columbia Business School in New York. “We had a very different structure a few years ago.”
Negin Kamangar graduated from the University of Chicago with an M.B.A. in 1994. She wanted to get into the entertainment industry, where connections are everything, and contacted the university’s alumni association asking for the names of Chicago graduates who worked at Disney. “All I got back was a stack of 200 pages from the association, listing grads in all of California. I found three people at Disney, and they’d all left the company by the time I called them,” she remembers.
That experience prompted Kamangar to launch an Ivy League community site in 1998 called GoldenParachute.com. It includes a job board, a resume-posting service and a “golden retriever” agent that searches for appropriate job matches. The site no longer confines membership to the elite: it includes 100 schools in the United States, as well as dozens of foreign universities. And the goals of the parent company, Golden Parachute, are shifting to outsourcing online services for individual schools and associations.
TheSquare.com, meanwhile, clings to its original focus on products of platinum schools. James Marciano, a Harvard alumnus, dreamed up the idea of an Ivy League networking site in 1996, when he got fed up with the anonymity of AOL’s communities. He decided to form a members-only site, which verifies its applicants’ alumni status and has now reached 42,000 graduates of 23 exclusive schools like Harvard, Amherst, Duke, Chicago and Stanford.
TheSquare has proved useful in some surprising ways. Wharton M.B.A. Dave Shankman started perusing TheSquare in 1999 to hook up with classmates and lost friends. The former product manager for Warner-Lambert was not actively searching for a job. But when he happened to notice a posting on the site for a VP of marketing at New York’s Vindigo, then a tiny wireless-services company, he was inspired. Shankman sent in his resume, got a call and soon had an Internet Economy job.
Shankman was a classic “passive job seeker,” exactly the sort of person whom recruiters and start-ups salivate over. TheSquare CEO Marciano thinks that its career center will continue to be a major draw for the site, which had more than 23,000 unique visitors in August–a quarter of whom went to the career center. Many postings come with bounties (in some cases, thousands of dollars) for alumni who refer their friends to the employer. TheSquare takes a 40 percent cut, Marciano says–a revenue stream he hopes will put TheSquare in the black.
Another alumni-focused organization is eProNet, based in San Mateo, Calif., which launched a new site this summer. The site seeks to connect companies with its 100,000 members, who can post their resumes anonymously for review on the site. The site lets employers (no recruiters allowed) browse the resume database for a monthly fee of $499, or a three-month fee of $699, plus a “success fee” of 15 percent of each hire’s annual salary. By sending a message to an e-mail address set up for members at the site, hiring managers can make direct contact with alumni–more than 70 percent of whom have advanced degrees and more than 10 years’ work experience and whose salaries average above $100,000.
Top business schools are also getting into the game, allowing employers to advertise to alumni directly on their Web sites; these include Columbia, Harvard, Kellogg, Tuck and the University of Chicago. Columbia posts 150 to 200 jobs on its site exclusively for Columbia alumni. Any employer can go to Columbia’s site, fill out a form online and submit a job for review. Tuck just opened a site, TuckJobs.com, for its alumni. Erin Cochrane, director of career services at Tuck, says the aim is to incorporate interactive job-searching features and content about careers: “Ultimately, I’d like to be competitive with the best commercial sites.” Seeing the site as part of Tuck’s mission to serve alumni and students rather than as a money-making venture, she doesn’t intend to charge for the job postings.
No matter how savvy new Web-based recruiting services for elite prospects become, employers will have to face the reality that word of mouth is still a top form of job intelligence in this community. Companies determined to create a pedigreed staff from one or two alma maters may have to resort to more aggressive tactics–such as hiring professors. San Francisco’s Intelligent Markets, an e-commerce infrastructure-software company, did just that. It recruited the CEO’s brother, Dan Huttenlocher, a professor of computer science at Cornell. On leave from Cornell and now VP of software development at the company, he’s brought six of his former students on board. The team interacts well together, he says. “They were educated in the same program, so I think they have a common vocabulary,” Huttenlocher says.
Whether it’s smart to hire several key employees from the same school is another matter. Today it seems many Internet and e-commerce companies care less about diversity and more about getting a sure thing: an experienced and highly educated manager from a big-name school. The online recruiting sites are more than happy to deliver the goods–if only they can figure out how to make a buck.
