Once Upon a Time* There was an Awesome Company (and Client) Called Select Minds. A Private Alumni Network. Here's an Encore Podcast with the founder and CEO, Anne Berkowitch
*Select Minds was acquired by Oracle in 2012.
I decided to republish this interview from 2010 while working on a new Future of Work episode with Jeff Wald, the founder of WorkMarket. In his new book titled, The End of Jobs, The rise of On-Demand Workers and Agile Corporations, Jeff advocates for Alumni Labor Clouds. This reminded me of a once-great client of TotalPicture Media named Select Minds. I had covered their annual user conference for a couple of years and produced numerous videos and podcasts with their leadership and clients, which included Swiss Re, JP Morgan Chase, IBM, Lockheed Martin, Deloitte, and EY.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT:
Anne Berkowitch Former CEO, Select Minds
INTRO: Referral networking helps companies leverage current and former employees as referrers of talent and new business. For more than 10 years, Select Minds has created corporate employee and alumni networks that help create organizations recruit talent, enhance their brand, and develop new business by focusing on one key fact – good people prefer other people.
Welcome to an inside recruiting channel podcast on TotalPicture Radio. This is Peter Clayton reporting from New York City. Joining us today is the founder and CEO of Select Minds, Anne Berkowitch.
Anne, thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us.
I first met Anne a couple of weeks ago at John Sumser’s salon in New York at a very nice little restaurant – the Park Avenue Bistro. We had a really great time there.
So, give us your elevator pitch, Anne. What does Select Minds do and who do you do it for?
Anne: I think you just gave our elevator pitch but I will try to do…
Peter: With the introduction, yeah.
Anne: With the introduction. Exactly. We – as you very appropriately said – we help companies build networks of their current and former employees (employees and alumni) that companies do leverage to help drive referrals of talent, of new business, and that they use as general branding.
We started about 10 years ago. Launched the idea of a corporate alumni network – this was before the days of social networking – really as a recruiting solution with the idea that in fact the former employees of a company provided a very rich talent pool, as counterintuitive as that is, either to rehire some of the best players or to leverage relationships of the alumni to drive referrals of other talent.
Then, over the 10 years we’ve been doing that have found that for many sectors, alumni could be clients. They go to customer organizations as well. So maintaining relationships with those alumni was very good for generally maintaining the brand and keeping former employees informed of the brand, but also to drive referrals of new business and of talent.
Peter: I have to think that your approach to this business today is completely different than it was 10 years ago.
Anne: It’s completely different. Interestingly, the core idea isn’t any different. It’s based on, as you said, I mean good people know good people.
Peter: Right.
Anne: It’s based on the notion that a company’s employees and alumni know other people like them that are of value to an organization either because they can become customers, or they could become employees. But the way the companies are managing those relationships and leveraging those relationships is completely different, obviously, with the advent of social networking.
Today, it’s companies trying to understand the social web, trying to maintain these relationships online throug...
