Hire Today, Gone Tomorrow?

Be True to Your Alumni

Bain & Co. communicates with its alumni more often than most companies communicate with their current employees. The firm employs more than 2,000 people around the world - but has more than 1,900 alumni in North America alone. These people receive frequently updated alumni directories. They get invitations to attend cocktail receptions or to participate in panel discussions. They read a biannual newsletter that chronicles developments at the firm as well as the professional achievements and personal milestones of other alumni.

Why pay so much attention to people who used to work for you? Tierney offers a list of answers: "Scott Cook, cofounder and chairman of Intuit. Kevin Rollins, vice chairman at Dell Computer. Greg Brenneman, who left our Dallas office to help pull Continental Airlines out of Chapter 11. Those kinds of alumni send a strong message to people who are thinking about coming here and to people who are already here. The message: We are going to make you more marketable."

Now, don't get the idea that Bain is resigned to losing good people for the wrong reasons. If someone is unhappy, says Tierney, "we push the pause button and stop the action. Would this person prefer to be working on different projects? Is the work-family balance out of whack? Is this person's compensation out of sync with the market?" But if the employee is, as Tierney puts it, running toward an opportunity rather than away from Bain, he or she gets the firm's full support. "Employees don't want to see you kicking ex-employees in the behind on the way out the door," Tierney says. "Because then they'll know that you'll do that to them when they leave."

Indeed, unlike many professional-services firms, where departing employees are escorted from the building with a box of personal possessions in tow, Bain welcomes people who leave the company into its alumni network, which has been up and running since 1985. "People who leave aren't rejecting you," insists Cindy Lewiton Jackson, 43, Bain's manager of career development and alumni relations. "If people want to be successful somewhere else, you should feel great about that. The more successful our alumni are, the more successful we are."

Jackson's job is to show these people just how great Bain feels about their new life. They receive a stream of communication from Jackson's office. They gain access to online resources that can help them hire other Bain alums for their new companies. They schmooze at receptions held in 12 of the 25 cities where Bain has offices, and they speak at company-sponsored panel discussions. And joining the Bain alumni network doesn't preclude returning to the nest. In fact, Tierney says, over the past 18 months, more than half of the firm's new vice presidents have been Bain alums.

Mark Horwitch, 41, is one such vice president. Like Tierney, he started at Bain in 1980, fresh out of Harvard Business School. In 1985, he was promoted to vice president, and in 1988, he left to lead a series of turnarounds in industries ranging from lingerie to plush toys. "I always felt I was still a part of Bain, even though I wasn't working there," says Horwitch.

By 1996, what Horwitch describes as the "constant negativity" of turnaround situations began to grate on him. "You're dealing with things like 'Which plants do I have to close?' and 'Where can I cut expenses?'" he says. "After seven or eight years of that, I wanted to work on more positive things." He'd been getting periodic phone calls from Tierney, who let him know that he was welcome to come back at any time. In 1997, Horwitch returned to the firm. (He now works out of its Chicago office.)

But Horwitch wasn't the same vice president as the one who had left Bain in 1988. He brought with him a rich set of experiences at various companies, where he had worked as CEO, COO, or CFO, and where he had developed "an even deeper level of empathy for what operating executives face every day," he says. "Unless you've actually walked in their shoes, you can't appreciate what it takes to get things done."

For Bain, the Horwitch case offers the best of all possible outcomes. But Tierney emphasizes that alumni who never return remain part of the fabric of the firm. "We're building a network of people who share a common heritage and a loyalty to this institution," says Tierney. "We don't care where their paycheck comes from."