Your vast, untapped alumni opportunity

Welcome to Spark, a newsletter from Vivace. We curate and publish the most interesting thinking and ideas from our community on themes ranging from business and finance to culture and creativity. Send pitches and feedback to [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you.

Hello Spark reader,

Last year we featured a Spark from Lauren Harbury about the rise of the personal brand and how businesses can and should be more intentional in activating their employees as brand advocates. Now we turn to the next frontier of untapped potential for your brand: your alumni.

Emma Sinclair MBE is a serial entrepreneur and an early identifier of exactly that opportunity, founding EnterpriseAlumni to help some of the world’s largest companies create ongoing business value by engaging with their former employees. She spoke to Vivace friend and former colleague Katharine Ramsden about why alumni are such an important audience and the benefits of building an alumni network.

—joel

What inspired you to focus on alumni in the first place?

Alumni networks are complex but incredibly rewarding ecosystems—for both alumni and their former employers.

My inspiration came directly from my own life experiences. Throughout my life, I’ve often turned to former colleagues for advice and support—indeed some of my former colleagues were early investors in EnterpriseAlumni, and Investment Bank Rothschild & Co, where I started my career in Mergers & Acquisitions are also one of our clients—a full-circle alumni moment!

From a macro perspective, companies spend millions finding, hiring, up-skilling and retaining alumni only to say ‘thanks, bye’ when they leave. In a world where job tenure is 1-3 years, it just doesn’t make sense—so it felt like a vast, untapped opportunity. And experience tells us that large company initiatives that start manually but have scale will need tech.

Why are alumni such an important audience and network?

Lifetime employment has become a distant memory, and yet so much effort, resource, and money go into hiring people. What a waste to make such an investment only to throw it away on departure day.

Alumni are potential rehires and a source of referrals, from an HR perspective. They are clients and introducers from a revenue perspective. And more broadly, they are a large marketing army that companies could be directly engaging with to own the narrative.

Boomerang hires have become the most coveted employees: In today’s market, employers are far more likely to rehire someone they already know and trust—their alumni—rather than go through the lengthy and costly process of recruiting and training someone new. Stability and security are highly valued. In fact, research from ADP showed that, as of March 2025, 35% of all new hires in the U.S. were boomerang employees—mind-blowing!