Interview Transcript

Welcome to an Talent Acquisition Channel special feature on TotalPicture Radio, recorded at the SelectMinds Annual Client Conference in New York City. SelectMinds enables companies to revolutionize the way they acquire talent, by leveraging the social networks their current and former employees have already built to generate high-quality referral and rehire candidates.

The SelectMinds product suite, AlumniConnect and TalentVine leverage an organization's most valuable asset – their people. With SelectMinds technology, companies can recruit top talent not only from within their employees' social networks but also from their own private secure employee and alumni networks. These referral-based environments drive recruitment, new business development, brand evangelism, and ultimately — business growth.

Welcome to a special Talent Acquisition Channel's podcast on TotalPicture Radio from the SelectMinds' Client Conference in New York. This is Peter Clayton reporting and joining us today is Myrta Barell, Swiss Re Alumni Manager and Sam Fullmer, Vice President Human Resources Information Technology Division at Swiss Re. Founded in Zurich, Switzerland in 1863, Swiss Re Insurance Company operates in more than 25 countries with a presence on all continents and provides its expertise and services to clients throughout the world. Swiss Re's Traditional Re-insurance products and related services for property and casualty, as well as for life and health businesses, are complemented by insurance-based corporate finance solutions and supplementary services for comprehensive risk management.

Peter: Myrta and Sam, thank you very much for taking time to speak with us today.

Myrta, your role as the Alumni Manager at Swiss Re, is a new position within the company. Can you expand on your responsibilities for us?

Myrta: Sure, Peter. I am the Swiss Re Alumni Manager.

Peter: You are the…yes.

Myrta: I am the Swiss Re Alumni Manager. There is only myself and with that I manage all formalized relationships with our alumni, anything relating to communications with them, events, different activities that we can do for them regarding corporate social plans or ideas like that, that all comes through me and through my network.

Peter: How did you end up with this role?

Myrta: I ended with this role because I was actually a member of the Goldman Sachs alumni network and that was known, so it came through and they asked if I would investigate it, look into it and go from there.

Peter: Tell us about the Swiss Re Alumni Network which is powered of course by SelectMinds. We are at the SelectMinds Conference here. How long has it had been online and why did your management decide to invest in this platform?

Myrta: Our alumni network itself has been online now for two years.

Peter: So you're veterans at this.

Myrta: We're getting there, yeah.

Peter: Yeah, two in this space, are you kidding?

Myrta: Especially in Europe and in Switzerland, it's not well known yet.

Peter: And in an industry that's conservative and...

Myrta: Extremely conservative, so we had a lot of challenges with that. I think the reason that we actually decided to invest in it was in the beginning of 2008, so before all the big crash has happened, our CEO was the member of an alumni network at the time for another investment bank and he thought it was a great idea and he really thought that it was something good for Swiss Re.

Peter: That's interesting.

Myrta: That's where the push came and we were able and we had all the approvals done before the crash happened so we were able to put it through and keep it going.

Peter: Even three or four years, having a job description as expanding an alumni network didn't exist. Obviously, you're senior level person, why has this become so important to your organization that they've put somebody as senior as you into this role?

Myrta: The importance of it now – as you say, reinsurance is a very traditional business and I often quote it as being an incestuous business. There are only so many people who go into underwriting. There is only so many people that go into that area. It's not what you grow up dreaming of becoming an underwriter, a client marketer for reinsurance. So from that, we do have people who leave the company and move on to someone else. With keeping the alumni network, we keep in touch them, we keep a direct link to them, we make them feel good about the company, so maybe someday we can bring them back or they can give us referrals to other people who know the company.

Peter: You're in a business that's all about numbers; what's the ROI on running this kind of a network?

Myrta: When we did our business case for actually bringing up the network, we were told we could focus on business development and all of that but those numbers were too outlandish for me and it wasn't going to be very measurable in our business. So instead, we focused on referrals and rehires and so our entire ROI comes from that side of the business, how many people we can rehire or we can get referrals from.

Peter: Since you've launched this alumni network, what kind of metrics have you been able to generate? How many people are part of your alumni network? How easy or hard has it been to get people to join the alumni network?

Myrta: Swiss Re has approximately 10,000 employees and we currently have close to 2000 alumni on our site. So if you look at the overall numbers, it's quite high. People, once they find out about the network, they're very keen. We have our ex-CEO. As soon as he left, he signed up right away. Our ex-chief investment officer is on there. We have the ex-deputy CEO. These people are very keen on being in there and keeping a contact to Swiss Re.

Peter: That's really interesting. What have been some of the challenge? Now, is your alumni network global? Are you across all continents?

Myrta: We are global. Of course, our largest alumni base is in Zurich, in Switzerland. That's where most of our people are.

Peter: Right.

Myrta: In Switzerland, when you leave Swiss Re, you frequently stay in Switzerland, so that is my largest client base. We are in other locations as well. We're working on expanding the UK market particularly because when people leave London, they often go to clients or competitors so they stay in the business in London, so we're working there and also looking at how we can expand in the US and Asia.

Peter: Great. Sam, tell us about your role as VP of Human Resources Information Technology Division. That's a very long title. What do you do?

Sam: I support IT within Zurich and I'm relatively new to the firm. I've been in Zurich little shy of a year and also within Swiss Re little shy of a year supporting IT. I do come out of financial services and investment banking and investment management, but it is a new challenge for me for this role and I manage with the Zurich-based IT recruiting.

Peter: Talk a bit about the financial services industry. It's highly regulated I'm sure probably in Switzerland as much as it is here in the United States, what impact does that have on recruiting especially in using social networks and alumni networks?

Sam: There are a lot of areas like what Myrta was talking about, it's an incestuous environment in financial services in general and especially within reinsurance and so that limits my capabilities as a lateral recruiter to source directly into many clients, because well they're our clients, so that limits us. We also have the firewall, so if you look at Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, that creates another obstacle for us within Switzerland and of course, globally, and another thing I would want to highlight that we are a global firm but we adhere to local laws and in Switzerland you are impaired. Your ability to own and mine data is restricted much more than in the US, so I actually see that if we can get to where we can leverage the social media outlets, we'll be able to reach out to people that we currently can't, but I think that entails some creativity.

Peter: How competitive is the market in Zurich and let's say in the United States where you are trying to recruit top candidates?

Sam: It's still highly competitive. The people that we're looking to find are typically passive candidates and so you don't find them by job posting, so it's typically referrals. We use some head hunters and now, we're trying to utilize LinkedIn which is something we've actually just started to launch in our US-based recruiting.

Peter: Myrta how connected is Swiss Re and how important are sites like LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter? I mean since they're blocked on your firewall and your employees can't use them, how do you go about using these networks and making them meaningful?

Myrta: As Sam said, they are blocked. Just recently, I just found this week looking at a new LinkedIn initiative to use that for recruiting in New York or in the US. We're looking at piloting that, see how that goes, but as far as the Facebook and Twitter, we don't access it. We cannot access it in anyway. We use LinkedIn and Xing with the alumni network, with these both. We've set up little groups to be able to tell people "Come on back in," because Xing is an European based.

Peter: Right, it's the European version of LinkedIn.

Myrta: Of LinkedIn, exactly. A lot of the German-speaking people are on Xing and not LinkedIn but globally we also still use LinkedIn because that has a higher population but again, we use those for the alumni side, but for recruiting, they're not yet used.

Peter: Sam how about video and sites like YouTube, are you incorporating that kind of rich-media content in your recruiting strategy?

Sam: We haven't done that within recruiting. We did use it for our marketing initiative in the US, but we're first going to launch the LinkedIn here in the US and see how that goes before we utilize other outlets.

Peter: One of the challenges that a number of organizations have is around mergers and acquisitions and I know you are no stranger to those activities. You acquired Barclays Life Assurance Company in 2008, so how do you emerge alumni networks when you bring in a large entity like Barclays into your network?

Myrta: From our side until now, I have never been confronted with saying there was another established alumni network for a company that we have merged with. What we do is if somebody is working for the company when it's merged with Swiss Re and they stay with Swiss Re and get at least one paycheck from Swiss Re, then they can join the Swiss Re alumni network if they leave. If they left before the merger was completed, they're not eligible.

Peter: You've really taken a leadership role in the whole area around sustainability and corporate social responsibility. The company partially refunds employees purchases, things like hybrid cars and energy-efficient refrigerators, has this helped in your recruiting efforts Sam?

Sam: Oh, absolutely. I think that even during the financial crisis, candidates are still very selective and this is something very important. I was actually surprised by this that the green initiative that Swiss Re has and it's integrated into the culture, so as you mentioned, we have the – we call it the COU2. If you purchase a hybrid automobile over a five-year period, you get $1000 each year back and we also have a month out of the year where it's you're your bike to work.

There are a lot of programs throughout the company, we recycle and even flexible work schedules that are encouraged by the firm, and this is something that's really important to people who are socially conscious. It's a huge branding piece for Swiss Re.

Peter: In Switzerland, you are far more conscious of recycling and green initiatives and we are here in throw-everything-away America.

Sam: Absolutely, even in Zurich there's a tax levied on trash bags, that you have to use specific trash bags called the Zuri-Sack. You're not allowed to use other sacks in trash bins. I think people are much more cognizant of their waste.

Peter: Myrta, have all of these initiatives around sustainability and corporate social responsibility, have those helped engage your alumni in this alumni network?

Myrta: Until now we have not extended the offerings to our alumni. We are looking at ways to do that. I have met with people here in the US just the other day and we're looking at different ways to further expand in the US because they're looking at it and have a few more offerings actually. In Zurich, we're looking at different things we can extend more from the charity of the year and donations from the CSR side there, but it's very slow. We also have a retiree network embedded within our alumni network and for our Zurich-based retirees, we actually do have various offerings where they can take part and they can be involved but we have not yet opened that up to the alumni.

Peter: On the coolness factor of Swiss Re is London headquarters are located in the award-winning 30 St. Mary's Axe Tower, which is London's first environmentally sustainable tall building, among the building's most distinctive features are its windows which open. A high-rise building with windows that open, what a concept!

In all seriousness, does things like this matter to many of the top candidates when choosing an employer?

Sam: I believe so. I think that all the candidates we're trying to attract are top candidates and they come from a junior level all the way to a senior level. Lifestyle, work style content is very important to people and the fact that Swiss Re is committed to sustainability, it comes up very often during the recruitment process.

Peter: What are some of your objectives for 2011, Myrta? What are some of things that you're going to be working on that you're hoping to build out especially around your whole alumni network?

Myrta: I'd like to see more expansion globally and so we're working on different ways to bring in London, to bring in the US and Asia more buy-in from the HR teams in those locations to make more offerings. The big focus we have though is involved with the recruiting, an e-recruiting bringing it into – using for example with SelectMinds their new TalentVine product. We're very excited about integrating that with the Alumni, seeing how we can use it and if it works, trying to expand it to our employees.

Peter: Sam, you're excited about integrating these products and seen how you're able to mine the data that Myrta is able to acquire through the whole alumni networks?

Sam: Absolutely. I'm excited to eliminate other inefficient channels that we're currently using and to leverage media and then to piggyback on what Myrta is working on, I'm interested in the employee referral piece.

Peter: Where do you find your candidates? Do you use job boards? Do you use LinkedIn for sourcing? Do you use executive recruiters? How do you go about finding those really hard to reach candidates?

Sam: Right, all of the above and it is difficult because even though – I can only really speak for IT – Zurich is a rich hunting ground, if you will, for highly educated technical sophisticated candidates and some of those skills are fungible from outside of financial services but typically when you look at reinsurance, it's very specialized, so you might have one or two people on the globe who can perform a certain role. So currently we use all of those that you mentioned but we would like to be more efficient and more strategic which brings us back to some of the tools that we discussed earlier in the social media.

Peter: Do you coordinate regularly with your counterparts here in the United States and other parts of the world in your recruiting efforts?

Sam: Yes and no. Actually, that's something that's on the agenda for 2011 to have a more global consistent approach. Within IT, it's a global process that we already have and how we leverage agencies, how we leverage our talent pool, how we leverage the social media, that is a priority for us in 2011.

Peter: Myrta, can you give us some advice for someone who is just launching or thinking about launching an alumni network? What did you learn in that whole process and what could you share with us to help someone make that kind of a decision and just think about what they're going to need from a resource standpoint when they do launch an alumni network within their organization?

Myrta: I think the most important thing is to really know why you're doing it, be it a lot of people say we're going to do business development, we're going to do referrals, but really to know why and what your main reason is behind that. We made the conscious decision it was going to be more referrals and recruiting and because of that, that's where our focus has been.

The past two years, we've actually spent our time building up a population, so we had people to recruit and to refer from. Then it's really to have somebody in there who can be creative to engage the people. You need to have your alumni network engaged. You have to know when to talk to them, when not to talk to them and when to actually bring them in.

Peter: Sam, have you been surprised by the results that Myrta has been able to accomplish with the alumni network?

Sam: Actually yes, and she's done it in a relatively short amount of time. I think the culture in Switzerland and especially within reinsurance, it's a data-driven environment and it's financial services but it's relationship driven and it's long-term relationship driven and Myrta has I think been able to build this up in a relatively short amount of time because of her strong relationships within Swiss Re and the larger community, so yes, we've been really excited about it.

Peter: Myrta and Sam, thank you so much for speaking with us today on TotalPicture Radio. I've really enjoyed our conversation and meeting you here at the SelectMinds Conference.

We'd like to thank SelectMinds' client Swiss Re and Alumni Manager, Myrta Barell and Sam Fullmer, Vice President Human Resources Information Technology Division at Swiss Re for participating in today's conversation. Visit Myrta and Sam's feature page in the Talent Acquisition Channel on TotalPicture Radio. That's TotalPicture.com to voice your opinion.

Working with the world's biggest brands to acquire top talent and manage alumni, SelectMinds leverages the promise yet simplifies the complexity of doing business on the social web. It's social networking with a purpose. Visit SelectMinds.com to learn more or call 877-276-3978.

This is Peter Clayton reporting. Thank you for tuning in to TotalPicture Radio, the voice of career and leadership acceleration. Our interviews link your business with your customers and prospects.