http://www.erexchange.com/ERENETWORK/GROUPS/LISTING.ASP?LISTINGID={C194EDFF-2BF0-4768-9141-9AC23DD8805E}

Mark should post it on all of them.

This last article is more about damage limitation.

Should Firstmerit become involved in any litigation around recruiting; well, the plaintiff would have a smoking gun admission: ‘I intended harm and performed all these questionable acts to bring that about’

Firstmerit may have successful recruiting but one would wonder about risk management.This is a prime example of why there are (and should be) restrictions on blogging.

I wonder too, if management would stand up and defend their loyal recruiters should difficulty arise. (if the sun rises in the west that particular day, perhaps)

My sense is that this is a public relations campaign hatched in a nest of naivety.

regards,

and as for that ethics thing, no need to even go there – everybody is gonna read whatever you (or others) write on here and internalize it all and come back screaming, have it happen to me all the time when i talk about elicitation and intelligence collection activities through human contact…

BUT perhaps it might make sense for me, a, ummh, mildly opinionated guy, to chime here in on several items, in no particular order:

ethics and the law: lets skip ethics completely and talk about the law. let’s consider (detail is missing from your case study) how far firstmerit will go to collect information – interviewing prospective and recent hires and pumping them for intelligence is old news to corporate strategy and ci teams – and the road is littered with lawsuits john, all of them mapping directly to something which you’ve failed to address: yes, no corporation owns any individual (and noncompetes are crap), but all individuals have a legal (not ethical) responsibility to comply with their nondisclosures, and using some quasi-governmental-agency style undercooked intelligence training might lead these recruiters-turned-agents into dire straits when demands for ‘three names and numbers’ and other information begets another layer of dialogue, particularly one that violates that nda or touches proprietary information (for help on this subject, call scip.org and ask for a referral to a law firm member to discuss just how many lawsuits have happened as a result of hr/recruiting departments becoming overzealous)…you touched this subject with the use of CI in recruiting, but left me in want of explanation – much of what recruiters describe as CI is often market research or some sort of ‘research dept’ – intelligence informs the decision making process or produces actionable results, and to be honest, there’s zero insight into what this team is collecting, how they’re collecting, and where it’s all going…

that quote at the end of your reply: is jack welsh related to jack welch? (kidding)…seriously, a better quote might be ‘i am the doorman of my days’ (refrigerator johnny, an old cartoon)….i agree that folks need to separate sensitivity from productivity goals…but wait, we ARE all sentient beings, and so as a result i suppose that it might be hard for people to separate the ‘person’ from the ‘worker’ – oh, and with that in mind, let me make some wild guesses: at firstmerit, that team that you studied is over 80 percent male, average ages 28-33, mostly dark short hair, no facial hair, average height over 5’11 and all own the dvd release of ‘team america’ and quote ‘tommy boy’ at work (kidding, again, sorta)

hiring the top folks sight unseen? really it’s an impressive firm, and an impressive effort, but this spooked me out. honestly john, isn’t there some sense that people should be interviewed before being hired? and isn’t an offer letter without dialogue a bit on par with summer ice-cream shop hiring strategies at a summer resort? hopefully, firstmerit isn’t sending out offer letters to the next fastow or sullivan – because they were total stars before all that crap went down – but then, they won’t know will they? hell, who can be bothered with an interview, with calibration or quality control – it’s a war right? and friendly-fire casualties are always at least 1/4 of all deaths – so if firstmerit does wind up screwing up a few divisions, units or bringing on a few lawsuits as a result of a few expedited hiring processes, then so be it, it happens…just glad that i’m not part of their legal department or disaster recovery planning teams!

you noted, ‘Some members of the recruiting team wandered through a competitor’s offsite seminar wearing the competitor’s lapel buttons.’ clever, for some strange reason i thought that it was against the law to impersonate an employee of a corporation in a non-satire situation, but maybe i’m all wrong on that one…who has the time to deal with compliance anyways? impersonating employees with corporate clothing was something that kevin mitnick loved to do too, remember him?

developing recruiters by teaching them how to lie on the phone? wow, that’s a great skill set to build out! for some reason i though that this issue had been explored thoroughly in multiple public forums and described as not just unethical, but also illegal…call me crazy, but firstmerit reminds me a little, in a strange way, of a search firm i know of that was sued for labeling candidate files just a little descriptively…i just hope that the cost of litigation doesn’t eat up all of those big operational savings, that would be a kinda sucky presentation to have to give to shareholders or senior management…

also, you said, ‘When society wants a corporation to act in a certain way, it gets its representatives to pass laws to regulate that action. But personal ethics are not laws or corporate rules or policies. And because corporations are owned by individual shareholders, corporations have no obligation to listen to any individual’s personal belief that is not a shareholder, employee, or a customer.’…strange, as i recall, a corporation is in fact a ‘person’ by legal definition, and bears the responsibilities of a person within a community, and is obligated to comply with ordinances put forth by non-shareholders (which you DID say, sorta)…but interesting: personal ethics are not laws or rules or policies? thank god for that! otherwise we’d have to give jobs to women and african americans or those bothersome people in wheelchairs, with their damned 45 degree ramp requirements without rules that say so (i’m taking you back in time to the 40′s and 50′s john, where this comment makes much more sense)….damn those progressive idealists who took it upon themselves to recognize such imbalances before laws went into effect to protect the rights of minorities…if they only hadn’t been so damned sensitive then jack welch could have continued to hire and promote only white men for all of time! that woulda been cool, huh?

oh, add to that your other comment, ‘If you are not an owner of a corporation, you have little say in how a corporation operates.’ that’s fascinating, it would suggest that changes in industries like automotive, tobacco and utlities happened of their own volition – you know, because of thoughtful and insightful leadership…john, just one piece of advice for you: rent ‘the corporation’ and watch it, twice (and listen to what milton has to say..)

…hey, you know what, i’m reading this over and now i feel like it’s a bit harsh, maybe a bit dark in some areas…oh, but wait! i’m not a firstmerit shareholder, so my opinion doesn’t count anyways!
-dave

Now I wonder, why do I get misquoted, where have I or for that matter anyone else said that it was illegal or unethical to recruit -whether it be it a TPR or a Corp recruiter.

It is so interesting how words get twisted.

For my last recollection Recruiting is still legal, but at the rate we are going, wonder if that too will change.

Anyways I digress, Recruiting and Raiding/Poaching/Predatory Hiring are 2 complete different things. It may be to a companies best interest to know the difference.

And YES there are Laws that Do apply to Raiding/Poaching/Predatory Hiring and they do fall under the Antitrust/Trade Regulation – Federal Laws I might add but please note that every state also tightens the ropes that much more by having their own state bureau that enforces federal and state laws.

Federal Fines are up to 10 Million Dollars. Yep 10 million for corporation and 350 thousand per individual, and imprisonment up to three years.

Now when one reads the feds version one may think well duh, it doesn’t say anything about recruiting and hiring, that is until one reads the decisions of the court cases, and then there they spell out the whole thing for you…

By the way these acts cover many different aspects of Predatory Trade activities and Practices and UNFAIR business Practices (hmm sometimes I wonder are ethics and laws the same). Including deceptive or misleading advertising… That one falls under the title of Unfair or Deceptive Trade Practices.

‘The antitrust laws are aimed at protecting consumers’ purchasing power and saving jobs and businesses, all at the same time’

FOR MORE INFORMATION DON’T HESITATE TO CONTACT –
The FTC?s antitrust arm, the Bureau of Competition –
Bureau of Competition seeks to prevent anticompetitive business practices in the marketplace as well as enforcement of the antitrust laws
They do have a public reference line.

Think about it this way –
Teach one client hey this is how you hit your competitor, fight dirty this way, implement these stratagies

Now – go accross the street and say hey this is how one avoids being hit by the competitor accross the street, how do I know,exactly what he is going to do.. Why because I taught him how to attack you…

Now Thanks for the payment for education of survival of the fittest.

By the Way I never and I mean Never have a conflict of interest with my companies, in any shape way or form.. Will turn down clients to make sure I don’t need to.

By the way I am glad to say that I know that I am not the only sanctimonious, self righteous Recruiter who will do their best to maintain an ethical standard in recruitin and how we identify and recruit candidates for our clients.

By the way Michael, it is good to know that I do DO NOT RECRUIT OR PRACTICE RECRUITING in your field, seems that what you went through is a good example of bad recruiting tactics.

As for which side he’s on…this suggests a confrontational tone.

Are you suggesting you’re on one side and HR practitioners are on the other side?

My my, for someone with such a stellar repuation with her clients that she works solely with referral business you sure take a dim view of your clients by placing them on the other side of the fence from you.

Karen, I’m sure that’s not what you intended to say but the point is it’s another red herring that doesn’t have any more place in this conversation than the point you’re trying to raise.

Raising the awareness of how some less than creative name sourcers call in to companies and how to prevent them from easy access to your empoyee base in hardly taking sides.

If you’re worried about ABC company shutting you out at the gatekeepers desk then you have more important issues to deal with.

There’s a problem here with the term ‘poaching’ because no employee ever gets poached unwillingly. You can prevent competition for a while but eventually it comes back to you in spades. Polaroid won a devastating patent infringement case against Kodak in the 80s, but is all but history now that we’re all using digital cameras. Or look at the Baby Bells, whose monopoly on phone service means little in a world of cheap cell phones and flat-rate VoIP on cable modems.

Best,
-cwk.

Giving loose descriptions on ethics to try and justify all this is nonsense. This is not about what we all do for a living, it’s about the way we do it.

As a recruiter, you have an obligation to act professionally at all times and toward all parties concerned.

That’s it. End of story.

Candidates – Your changing their career. Treat them with complete respect and give them the discretion they deserve.

Client – Whether a TPR or CR, you represent the client. Be professional at all times.

Target Companies – You are talking to their staff about new opportunities. Do not do it to try and deliberately destroy them and do not attack them verbally. Treat them with respect. This is about the individual and the new opportunity, not the company they work for.

The only reason anyone steps outside of this is because of their incapability to operate within it.

Lying, false representation, fraudulent behaviour, setting out to destroy companies, bribing candidates …and more….

Let’s not make any more excuses for these bad practices. If you cannot operate professionally whether a TPR, Corporate Recruiter or whoever, then you should not be doing it.

So My question? Which side are you really on?

Indentured Servitude was officially outlawed in 1885 in the U.S.

Interesting article:
High Tech’s Indentured Servants
As Silicon Valley prospers, foreign workers are trapped in a tricky
waiting game.
By Pham-Duy D. Nguyen
http://programmersguild.org/archives/lib/Abuse/rh200007indentured.htm