Lost contacts operation: the winner, Alain Godet (GE 1992), and how he did it!

Edhec Alumni: Hello Alain and congratulations on winning the first Lost Contacts competition, in which you officially ‘found’ 16 people. Is there a link between the fact that you suggested the idea to the association and that you also won it?

Alain Godet: (laughs) it was really quite by chance, although I was naturally delighted to win it. In fact, I thought (and hoped) that there’d be tough competition and that someone else would win. I gave information about 40 people that I found, but only 16 were retained for the competition purposes. So you can’t say that I had any special advantage. What’s more, I think the runner-up wasn’t far behind me: it was touch and go right to the finish…

Edhec Alumni: Why do you think you won?

Alain Godet: I think there are several reasons. First of all, I’ve kept in close contact with my class and other people I knew at the time or even from different years (up to 2000) from when I was at EDHEC, 20 years ago. I manage this magazine (we were much more visible in the past than today), so I was already easily in touch with a lot of people. This year, I also managed my class year’s 20th anniversary and that was another major factor as I’d already started to look for some people before the competition began. On the other hand, most of the 40 people I found weren’t really my former classmates. Finally, most of my career has been in journalism, which means I’ve always had to use the Internet tools available to find people who’ve ‘disappeared’ accidentally or who deliberately keep a low profile. It was quite natural for me, but it isn’t necessarily so for most people, including the younger generations who’ve been more or less brought up with the Internet since the earliest age…

Edhec Alumni: What secrets can you share with us about how you did it? Direct contacts? Internet?

Alain Godet: The aim of the competition was to find as many people as possible. That means that it makes no sense for me to keep these techniques to myself, and sharing them will help other participants to find even more lost contacts next year. First of all, like everyone, I checked the list we were given with the people I know best. It’s the easiest, but not necessarily the most effective as, between these two lists, there were just a handful of points in common. Then, I focused on my class year. I was able to find the largest number of people by checking my contacts and the groups with something in common at the time. That’s where EDHEC and my memories came in, but Facebook was a big help too. You just need to have one contact in a group of likeminded people to find two or three other people. With the 200 Edhec people that I’ve got as Facebook contacts, it was relatively simple.

It’s more difficult with people who don’t use this site: in my class year, 2 in 3 people don’t have a Facebook account. You can use Copains d'Avant (which doesn’t give an e-mail address or phone number but at least you get a region where you can search in the Yellow Pages) or, even better, LinkedIn. We can find professional links between Edhec people, and then you can ask your personal contacts for the contact details of other people. LinkedIn is a fantastic way to find people in a professional setting without necessarily getting a fee-paying account. Out of the 40 people I found, over half of them were just though LinkedIn. Even better: after you’ve identified the company where the target person works, you can easily work out their e-mail address. You just have to check in the Edhec Handbook, find another alumnus who works in the same company, see what their e-mail address is and then apply the same model to your target. If there aren’t any Edhec people in the firm, then you just need to find the company’s website on Google, then make an “edhecalumni.com mail” type request to find the e-mails of other employees in the same company on the Internet. Then, you use the same method to work out your target’s e-mail address. In Western Europe and America, it works 90% of the time! There’s just one difficulty with this technique: hyphenated first names.

It’s not much more complicated for people who don’t use any social network. Just with Google alone, we can find a lot of them via interviews, appointments, etc. We find their company and then we use the previous technique to find their e-mail address. That’s how I found someone who’d disappeared to South Africa… Just one tip: to make the search engine work more effectively, type the target’s first name and surname between inverted commas: like that, Google will treat the two words as just one, which will eliminate many of the parasite pages you’d otherwise get.

And once you’ve got the company, you’ve got the town, and with the town you’ve got the region, and then you often just need to use the Yellow Pages to find the personal details in most countries. Don’t forget to use the automatic translation function in Google Chrome (just in English as the results in French are pretty rubbish) to browse the sites more easily when you don’t know the language. It’s amazingly effective. And if you’re absolutely determined to find someone, take your list and call their parents. If they’ve moved, call the neighbours and ask them if they know where their former neighbours have moved to (as long as it’s not in a high rise building with 150 people on the same floor): social engineering is also VERY useful to find people…

There are some people these methods won’t work with: those who deliberately delete their web footprint (it’s rare, but it can happen, especially when you move up the social or corporate ladder), hyphenated names (as mentioned earlier), very simple first names and surname or too many homonyms are enough to hide their tracks, and finally women who often take their husband’s name and disappear into thin air.

Edhec Alumni: it’s just by using those methods that you found 40 people?

Alain Godet: That’s right. And what’s interesting is that these methods like LinkedIn or Google apply just as well for people that you don’t even know. I promised I would bring the association 40 people. I had 30 that I'd more or less known. That meant I had to find another 10. So I raked through a few other class years looking for men with atypical names. I tried 15 and I found 10 in less than half an hour. A final word of caution: if you haven’t found any trace of a person within two minutes, then you might as well give up!

Edhec Alumni: in other words, you think that with Internet and a bit of methodology, most people can be found almost anywhere in less than 10 minutes?

Alain Godet: absolutely. Unfortunately, this year I didn’t have much time, professionally speaking, to get more involved in the competition which was launched at the worst time for me regarding my workload. But I’m sure that if I could free up a few weekends, I could find a hundred people, most of them people I don’t know. Anyone can do it! I hope that next year more people will use these methods to find more lost alumni.

Edhec Alumni: Thank you Alain!