Elite for Hire - Company Business and Marketing

Industry Standard, The, Oct 16, 2000 by Meredith Alexander

Companies love those Ivy Leaguers, but finding them is a challenge. New sites are helping.

When Syl Tang founded HipGuide, a New York startup promising a Web and wireless-based "digital butler" for young professionals, she wanted to make sure her first hires were the cream of the crop.

"When I started this company, I couldn't find a programmer to save my life," Tang says. She clicked around TheSquare.com, a New York-based community site for Ivy League and other top-tier school alumni. That's where she noticed Josh Beaton and his Web consulting business profiled in the new member showcase. Tang later hired the programmer -- a Yale grad -- to guide her site's launch this January.

"That first hire was very crucial for us. Without him we'd be a very different company today," Tang says.

Tang, a Cornell grad, has long realized the value of alumni contacts; she landed her former job at Andersen Consulting through a woman she met at an alumni networking event.

Employers are dying to hire graduates of top-tier schools, especially those who hold coveted MBA and advanced engineering degrees. Companies are even starting to target candidates from specific colleges, says Craig Silver-man, senior VP at recruiting firm Hall Kinion in San Francisco: "You will get a hiring manager saying, 'We're very high on people that come out of Stanford or Berkeley.' It could be they've had success with people from those schools or their executives come from there."

But making a company stand out in a world of overwhelming Monster.com-type job boards and aggressive executive recruiters is not always easy. And, in today's tight job market, most grads of top schools have work already; those who are looking aren't doing so anywhere near campus.

Much of the problem for both alumni and companies wanting to recruit them is a lack of communication. For years, the only links between alumni that could facilitate job leads took place at reunions or occasional club meetings. For grads, schools -- with their outdated alumni directories -- haven't been the greatest source of job information. For employers and recruiters, alumni associations and career centers at the top schools aren't always efficient or helpful with their job searches.

Now a new breed of Web sites catering to Ivy League alumni could change the face of networking, opening up those exclusive recruiting channels for all employers.

Several third-party commercial sites -- like TheSquare.com -- have created communities for grads from dozens of the country's leading universities, providing a place for employers to advertise jobs and search for candidates. Some of these services are free for employers, others require fees -- but so far, all are much cheaper and can be faster than hiring an executive recruiter.

In response to a more mobile and wired alumni base and to the popularity of online job boards, alumni associations and career services programs at top schools have also begun to wise up and are creating their own online services for this market. "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."

BATTLE OF THE ALUM SITES

Just a few years ago, like-minded alumni might never find each other - even if they tried. Negin Kamangar graduated from the University of Chicago with an MBA 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 that includes a job board, resume posting service and a "golden retriever" agent that searches for appropriate job matches. The site no Longer confines membership to the creme de la creme of American academies: It now includes 100 schools in the United States as welt as dozens of foreign universities. And the goals of the parent company, Golden Parachute, are shifting toward outsourcing online services for individual schools and associations.

TheSquare.com has remained truer to its original focus of providing networking opportunities for grads of select 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 such as Duke, Northwestern and Stanford.

TheSquare has proven useful in some surprising ways. Wharton MBA 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.