The idea that stealing is wrong has been engrained into us since early childhood. Nonetheless, when it comes to stealing employees from competitors, moral lines become blurred for some reason, especially when you can’t run a Google search on the topic of poaching without coming across articles in respectable publications with titles like “How to Master the Art of Poaching Employees,” “How to Poach Talent Politely,” etc.

Undoubtedly, the issue is much more complicated than it seems on the surface. So let’s get to the bottom of it.

Why Do Some Companies Poach?

Companies today want to onboard talent with the right kind of experience. They want people who are not only skilled and educated, but who are also familiar with their respective industries and workplace culture. For many hiring managers, the main source of such coveted employees is the talent pool of their rival companies.

While hiring from competitors may seem like a simple solution, there are conflicting views regarding this practice.

The Legality of the Matter

In many countries, poaching employees entails potential legal consequences. Losing talent to competitors ends up in a high employee turnover. This, in turn, results in the employer incurring substantial expenses in the form of recruiting, retraining, and, in many cases, sign-on bonuses. In other words, they not only end up paying more money, but also lose an opportunity to make more money during the lengthy onboarding process.

For this reason, many companies take legal measures to suppress employee poaching. These include

• Non-Compete Agreements: contracts between the employee and the employer that prevent the employee from working for a competitor for a certain period of time after leaving the company.
  
  
• Non-Solicit Agreements: contracts between the employee and employer that prevent the employee from encouraging other employees to leave the company after he has done that himself.
  
  For example, an employee who has left his job to start his own company isn’t legally permitted to ask his former coworkers to join him at his new company. Although the length of such agreements vary from employer to employer, they generally last for about one year.
  
  
• No-Poach Agreements: agreements between companies that prevent them from hiring each other's employees – a practice once highly popular in Silicon Valley in particular.
  
  However, these types of agreements are not as black and white as one might think. In 2015, Google, Apple, Intel, and Adobe were fined $415 million for forming a no-poach pact. This led the US Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission to release statements in the following year, declaring no-poaching agreements a form of collusion which is unlawful under antitrust laws.

The Ethical Side of the Matter

Pro-Poaching View

The term poaching is largely associated with the animal world and is defined as the illegal hunting or catching animals on someone else’s land.

Many people believe that the term is not applicable to headhunting - hiring employees from competitor companies. Admittedly, their point of view holds water, as they refuse to equate employees with animals. They claim that, unlike animals, people do not belong to their employers and are free to make a choice. If they feel that moving to another company is the right decision, they are completely within their right.

Anti-Poaching View

While no one is denying or undermining the importance of employee free will, there is a fine line between proactive hiring practices and poaching. Here are but a few reasons why employee raiding crosses the line into the unethical.

You run the risk of tarnishing your reputation. 
Many companies invest considerable resources into the training and development of their employees. So when another company shows up only to pick the crème de la crème of the workforce that was so patiently and carefully cultivated, it inevitably creates feelings of tension and resentment.

Soon enough, especially in tight-knit industries and marketplaces, your reputation starts to precede you, and you risk damaging your relationships with companies you have a business relationship with – be it clients, vendors, or partners.

The antidote to this type of sticky situation is having your own training and development program in place instead of constantly dipping into someone else’s talent pool, so that you aren’t simply seen as a conniver, but as someone with his own contribution to the greater good.

You run the risk of setting the wrong example.
One important but often overlooked consideration regarding poaching has to do with the poacher’s own company culture. What is the message that you are sending to your own employees? Do you want them responding to inquiries from other recruiters and job-hunting in chase of a bigger piece of the pie?  It really is a two-way street.

The story of Uber is a cautionary tale of a company that took its aggressive poaching practices, among other things, a step too far. The result was a dog-eat-dog company culture that left most employees dissatisfied and the company on the brink of disaster. Recovery from this type of situation is extremely difficult, and Uber is now in the midst of mitigating the culture crisis and the national backlash against the company by establishing their own Harvard-inspired corporate education program.

Poaching Practices in Armenia

The IT industry is infamous for talent poaching, and the Armenian tech scene is no exception. As the demand for talent far surpasses the supply, companies actively engage in poaching practices, which, in turn, result in increased salaries.

Some companies even take their poaching to the extreme by bombarding passive candidates with job offers with unrelenting persistence to pressure them into joining their companies. Software developers often complain about companies continuing to reach out to them with job offers even after having turned them down several times.

What Measures Can a Company Take to Prevent Poaching?

While companies may have different stances when it comes employee raiding, one thing is for certain – they don’t want their employees to be poached. With so many recruiters hovering over your employees, what are some of the steps you can take to avoid a talent leak?

1. Invest in Training

No one wants a dead-end job. The best employees are always looking for ways to improve, to update their skills, and to know the next steps in their career path. Having an established training program in place lets your employees know that you are willing to invest in them and that you care about their professional development. With a plethora of affordable online training programs, you don’t even have to break the bank doing so.

2. Build a Culture of Engagement and Empowerment

Whenever employees feel a lack of alignment between their jobs and the greater organizational objectives, their motivation tends to take a dive. This is why it is imperative that companies make sure their employees know the vital role they play in the organization and exactly how they are contributing to the bigger picture. Give your employees enough autonomy to be creative, make decisions, and make mistakes. An empowered workforce is much more likely to have a high level of job satisfaction and be invested in the success of your company.

3. Consider Long-Term Incentive Plans

Long-term incentive plans are a form of compensation that is tied to the future success of the company. Not only do they make a great financial incentive, they are also an excellent way to show your employees that they have an important role and a future with your company.

4. Don’t Sit Idly by

If you suspect or find out that one of your employees is considering leaving, go ahead and have a conversation with him and find out what’s bothering him. Is he bored with his job? Is he looking for new challenges? Does he feel that his career has stagnated? More often than not, you’ll find that there are actually steps you can take to prevent your employees from leaving.

If an employee does leave, and you are concerned about his team members following suit, you should talk to those people and find out what they need to stay. Be attentive to them and make sure they feel how valuable they are to your company.

Final Thoughts

Whether or not predatory hiring is within the bounds of the law is up for debate depending on the type of employee contracts. We can, however, all agree on the fact that the practice is taboo. In its essence, it is going behind a company’s back to steal its star employees – a practice that disturbs the market equilibrium and creates unnecessary tension.

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