Frequently asked questions

Alumden is a private network of trusted alumni referrals. You join, are placed into a circle for each past employer you list, and you can see — and be seen by — other people who worked at those companies.

The point is not networking in the abstract. It's:

• Backing and vouching for people you've worked with, so their next job hunt is easier.
• Surfacing roles posted by people in your circles, where a warm intro from someone shared is plausible.
• Letting recruiters see a credible, work-grounded picture of a candidate without trawling LinkedIn.

Anyone can sign up at alumden.com via a magic-link email. Once signed up, you get into a circle in one of three ways:

1. An invite from someone already on Alumden — accept and you're in.
2. A request to join — pick the circle from the list and click Request. Any current member of that circle can approve.
3. Start a new circle — if your past employer isn't already on Alumden, you can request one during onboarding. An admin reviews and either approves (your circle goes live with you as the first member) or declines.

A circle is a private group of people who worked at the same company. There's one circle per company. When you add a past employer to your profile, you either request to join its existing circle or, if it doesn't exist yet, request to start one.

Circles are how Alumden scopes who sees what. Vouches default to circle-only visibility. Jobs posted to a circle are visible to its members. Auto-imported roles only flow into circles where at least one current employee of the hiring company has signalled they're happy to refer.

A private list of people you'd love to work with again. Click the star on anyone's row in /people or in a circle. Only you see it. The system uses it to send you gentle nudges over time (e.g. “X is in your Dream Team — capture why, even a couple of tags helps”).

On /circles you'll see every active circle you're not in. Click Request to join on one and your request lands in front of the circle's current members. Any single member can approve and you're in.

Requests expire after 30 days if no one approves. You can re-request after that.

Any active member of the circle you're requesting. There's no separate circle-admin role — if you worked at Stripe and you're on Alumden, you can approve other people asking to join the Stripe circle. Admin can also approve from the admin queue.

Yes — in-app notification with a link straight to the circle.

During onboarding, when you type the name of a past employer, Alumden tries to match it to an existing org. If nothing matches, you'll be offered the option to Create a new circle for [Name]. That creates a pending request that an admin reviews.

While it's under review:

• The circle shows on your /circles page in a greyed “Pending review” section.
• No one else can join it because the circle hasn't been created yet — only the org request exists.
• You can continue using the rest of Alumden normally as soon as you're a member of any other circle.

If approved, you get an email and the circle goes live with you as the first member. If declined, you'll receive a personal email from the team explaining why. The pending entry disappears from your /circles list.

You'll be limited to /circles, /settings, /notifications, and your own profile until you're admitted somewhere. The rest of the app needs at least one circle to populate.

Either they haven't joined Alumden yet, or they've joined but haven't added that company to their work history. Invite them.

Removing yourself from your work history removes you from that circle. There's no other path today — you can't be evicted by other members.

• Back is a one-click thumbs-up. Use it when you'd recommend someone but a full vouch is more than you want to write. It shows up as a count on their profile and notifies them in-app.
• Vouch is a written endorsement. Tags + optional prompt answer + optional summary. Vouches are the strongest signal on the platform and they're what recruiters see in the dossier view.

A useful default: back people you'd happily work with again; vouch for the ones whose specific work you can describe in detail.

1. Someone you worked with asks you for one (you'll get a request in your inbox).
2. You see someone in your circle you'd happily endorse — write a proactive vouch from their profile.
3. You backed someone a while ago — Alumden will nudge you on /home to turn that back into a full vouch.

Pick at least 2 tags across the five categories (How they think, How they work with others, How they get things done, How they handle hard moments, Distinctive markers). Add a few of your own if the library doesn't have what you need. Optionally answer one of the curated prompts. Optionally add a free-text “Anything else?”.

Tags alone are enough. You don't have to write prose.

It runs your answer through Anthropic's Claude to tighten the prose. It preserves your voice and specific examples — it doesn't invent facts. You can take the polished version as-is, keep editing, or dismiss it. Original text isn't stored anywhere; only what you submit is saved.

The prompt picker cycles through the curated library of prompts. If the current one doesn't fit the person, hit it to swap for a different angle.

Depends on the privacy level the recipient sets. Vouches default to private until they promote them. See Privacy.

You get an in-app notification and an email. Vouches in your name show up under /vouches immediately.

You get an in-app notification. Backs don't trigger emails. If the same person unbacks and re-backs you within 24 hours, we only fire one notification.

Editing isn't currently supported. If you need a correction, message us and we'll sort it.

• Public — anyone in any of the recipient's circles can see it on their profile.
• Link — only visible to people who follow a share link the recipient creates. Doesn't appear on their public profile.
• Private — only visible to the recipient and the voucher.

Vouches default to private. The recipient promotes them to link or public if they want them surfaced.

The recipient. The voucher can see the vouch but can't override the recipient's privacy choice.

No. A share link is permanent until the recipient revokes it. If you want time-limited sharing for a job application, use the recruiter dossier instead.

Only via a share link the recipient sent them, or via a recruiter dossier sent by a referrer. There's no public profile lookup for non-members.

The team uses platform-admin tooling to investigate bugs and quality issues. The Polish endpoint sends your draft text to Anthropic when you click Polish; nothing is sent if you don't click it. We don't train on your vouches.

Two things, bundled:

1. People in your circles can see you're happy to make introductions, so they'll come to you when they know someone for a role.
2. You give Alumden permission to import publicly listed roles from your current employer into circles you're in.

If you don't want either, leave it off.

You have one or more open roles right now. Same auto-import permission as Open to refer. It also signals to other members that you're a useful person to talk to if they know someone good.

You're actively looking. It shows as a badge on your profile and gives circle members a reason to think of you when they spot a fit.

A daily Vercel cron pulls publicly listed roles from a company's careers page when:

• At least one current employee of that company is on Alumden, AND
• They've ticked Open to refer or Hiring.

Jobs are posted into the circles where those employees are active members. They land alongside manually-posted roles and carry an “auto-imported” badge so it's clear nobody hand-posted them.

Toggle Open to refer and Hiring off in Settings. Already-imported jobs stay live until their 30-day expiry, but no new ones will land.

1. A member of the circle posts a job manually.
2. Auto-import pulls publicly listed roles from a company where at least one circle member is open-to-refer or hiring.
3. An admin manually imports a batch from a company's careers page.

A soft signal — you'd like to be considered. The poster sees you on the candidate list. It's not an application.

On any job card in your circles, click Refer. Pick the person, choose which of your existing vouches for them to attach (or write a new one), and send.

30 days from posting. The poster can extend by another 30 (Edit → Extend) or close early.

We bundle refer-match emails into a single weekly digest (Mondays 09:00 UTC). Per-role emails were too noisy when several roles landed at once. The in-app notification is also a single aggregate.

When a referrer wants to send a candidate's profile to a hiring manager outside Alumden, they generate a dossier link (alumden.com/r/<token>). Hiring managers see the candidate's headline, the referrer's note, and the vouches the candidate has chosen to attach.

Yes. Dossier tokens carry an explicit expiry.

No. Only the vouches the candidate or referrer explicitly attached.

• Vouch received (always, in-app + email).
• Vouch request lands in your inbox (in-app + email).
• Someone expresses interest in a role you posted (in-app + email).
• Refer matches: weekly digest only (Mondays 09:00 UTC).
• Roles for you (open-to-work matches): in-app per-event for fast notifications, email bundled into a weekly digest (Mondays 09:30 UTC).
• People in your circles becoming open to work: weekly digest only (Mondays 09:15 UTC).
• Circle activity: invites accepted, new members.
• Join requests: daily digest when someone wants to join a circle you're in (only fires if there are pending items).
• Org approval: one-off email when your new-circle request is approved.

Backs don't trigger emails — in-app notification only.

Settings → Notifications. Each category has separate toggles for in-app and email. You can also restrict job-match notifications to people in your Dream Team only.

You're still in that company's circle as an alum, and someone there is happy to refer for that role. Toggle “Show jobs from former employers” off in Settings if you'd rather not.

Settings → Work history. Add, remove, or edit entries. The list drives which circles you belong to.

Profile pages are private to your circles. There's no public URL by default. Share individual vouches with a share-link to surface them outside Alumden.

Email hello@alumden.com — account deletion currently goes through us so we can confirm and clean up vouches you've written.

Settings → CV upload. Used by the referrer dossier.

Requests auto-expire after 30 days. The circle's current members are nudged daily via email if there are pending requests. You can also reach out to a colleague who's already in the circle.

Admin reviews new-org requests manually. If it's been more than a few business days, email hello@alumden.com.

Vouches default to private. The recipient has to promote it to link or public before it shows. Nudge them.

Auto-import requires:

• The company has a careers URL configured on Alumden.
• At least one current employee of the company is on Alumden.
• They've ticked Open to refer or Hiring.
• The role is on the company's public careers page.

If all four are true and you still don't see it, the daily cron may not have run yet.

Browser support: Chrome (desktop + Android) and Safari (desktop + iOS). Firefox doesn't ship the Web Speech API.