About Alumnify
The most powerful voice a university has is the one it never uses.
Every university has thousands of graduates around the world who would happily speak to the next student from their country. Alumni teams and recruitment teams sit in different buildings, with different KPIs, and rarely talk, so it almost never happens.
Alumnify exists to close that gap. We find those graduates, train them properly, pay them fairly, and put them in front of the offer-holders who need them, in the right markets, at the moment it matters.
Our founding story
It started with a frustration James could not ignore.
James O’GradyCo-founder and CEO
He had spent years in international higher education, most recently as Deputy Head of International Recruitment at the University of Bath. Time and again he saw the same thing. When prospective students heard from alumni, people from their own country who had already made the move, something shifted. Doubts softened. Decisions firmed up.
It almost never happened. Not because alumni did not want to help, because many of them were keen to give something back to the place that shaped them. The problem was structural. Alumni teams and recruitment teams sat in different buildings, with different KPIs, and rarely talked. So the most powerful voice a university had, its own graduates, almost never reached the people it would have helped most.
James left Bath in 2024 to fix that, and then called George, who he had worked with years earlier at an education agency in Japan and who had since been working in corporate finance.
The two of them built Alumnify around a single idea: that universities deserve a structured, professional way to put their alumni at the centre of how they recruit internationally, as the main event rather than a supporting act.
Today Alumnify works with twelve university partners, supporting their students across more than fifty countries. Different markets, different campaigns, the same idea underneath: the right voice, in the right place, at the moment a student is making one of the biggest decisions of their life.
What we are
- An alumni-led recruitment partner
- We run the campaigns end to end. You tell us the markets and the conversion goals.
- We do the part software cannot
- A platform hands you a directory and leaves you to find, vet, train and pay the graduates. That work is the business, not a feature of it.
- Run by people who know the sector
- Both founders have worked in international education. One of them held the job you are probably doing now.
A few of the people doing the work
Dilys
Jose
Onjjira
Dugalpi
Maureen
Raihan
Samir
Miracle
What we believe
Three values, and what they cost us.
They decide who we hire, what we pay Alumnifiers for, and what we do when a campaign is not working.
01
Look after the network
Alumnifiers are the heart of it. We pay full rate for training, we listen when they tell us something is not working, and we give them clear briefs and real preparation.
We do not call them ambassadors or volunteers, because they are trained graduates doing real work for real money, and the standard we hold them to reflects that.
02
Stay close to the work
Most agencies scale by getting further from the work. The founders stop running campaigns, the senior people stop joining calls, and the team that won the account is not the team that delivers it.
Founders stay on client relationships and the delivery team sits across the campaigns daily. Drift shows up in the data before it shows up in your numbers, because every conversation is logged and every Alumnifier's training and compliance is tracked in the same system.
03
Make it feel light
Universities come to us because international recruitment is heavy. Fragmented data, stretched teams, hundreds of offer-holders to nurture and not enough hours. Our job is to take weight off.
We hit deadlines and we do not ask you to chase us. Friendliness is a by-product of being well organised, not a substitute for it.
How we deliver
The people who sell it are the people who run it.
That is a deliberate structure rather than a consequence of headcount. Founders stay on client relationships, a dedicated delivery team runs the campaigns, and every campaign runs the same tracked process whether it covers two markets or twelve.
James
Co-founder and CEO
Spent years in international higher education, most recently as Deputy Head of International Recruitment at the University of Bath. Founded Alumnify in 2024.
George
Co-founder
Worked with James at an education agency in Japan, then spent several years in corporate finance before returning to the sector.
- Esma Operations Director
- Van Ops and Delivery Manager
- Linh Associate Ops and Delivery Manager
- Clara Associate Ops and Delivery Manager
- Jack Alumni Recruitment Manager
Where to start
Tell us your two hardest markets.
That is enough to have a useful conversation. We will tell you whether we already have graduates there, and what we would do first.
Book a scoping call Or email hello@alumnify-uni.com with the markets in the subject line.For graduates
Graduated from a UK university? Come and work with us.
We are always looking for graduates who can talk to prospective students in their own market, in their own language. You get paid for the training and paid for the work.
No experience in recruitment needed. What matters is that you did the degree, you live in the market, and you can hold a conversation with someone deciding whether to make the same move.
Name, university, course and where you are. A LinkedIn profile and CV help, but both are optional.