Like Heather Said, good job.

Karen M
858-668-3111

‘For many reasons, I have chosen to remain silent on the hysteria that surrounds discussions relates to poaching, ethics and sourcing candidates’.

Was it not you that posted one of the very first responses on this discussion and I repeat.

John and Master?s article of today entitled ‘Recruiting, Ethics and Culture.’ is clearly John and Master at their very best and it is an outstanding piece of work. It is so good that I wish I wrote it myself!

I am endlessly fascinated that organizations are unwilling to ‘steal’ the competition?s best players. The lack of desire to execute this critical aspect of building your business is laughable. (Not to mention the fact that you can?t steal an employee. If the competition has that concern, let their leadership build an organization that people are unwilling to leave as opposed to crying after they did!)

Poaching from the competition has nothing to do with ethics. As the good doctor and Master point out, there is no place for socialism in business. There is a war out there and the competition is using real bullets; as such, the objective is to destroy the enemy, not to make nice to them!

Also endlessly fascinating are the HR and recruiting people that pay search firms to steal from the competition. They explain it away by saying it gives them ?distance.? It gives them nothing other than the opportunity to write a check, play a fools game and demonstrate through modeling that they do not have the guts to lead by example. I can assure you that paying search fees gives you neither distance nor clean hands. Tell me, if I pay someone to punch you in the nose; is it really any different than if I punched you in the nose myself?

If I were the CEO of an organization, it would be my objective to put the competition out of business; plain and simple. If you do not see things this way, you just do not get it.

Just wondered :-)

For those line recruiters struggling to find ethical ways of sourcing candidates, talk to those who do it with success and find out what they are doing. Feel free to contact me if I can help at all with some ideas.

Great to see Kevin speaking up on this!

-HH

PS: I don’t think the dialog harming our industry. I think it’s benefiting our industry by highlighting people who are doing things with honesty and integrity. Everybody already knew there were people who weren’t. People on both sides of the issue are easier to identify now and I’m actually grateful for that.

~~Kevin Wheeler

‘Important’ to whom? Certainly not to a client, unless, of course, it and its recruiter (and it would take both, wouldn’t it?) conspired to ‘win’ the candidate by knowingly misrepresenting job content, opportunities for growth, compensation, and so on.

‘Winning’ and ‘finding’ are discreet steps in the process of moving an A-Player onto a client’s workforce.

When it comes to ?finding?, I will continue to penetrate target companies with whatever means prove effective and that my attorney advises me are defensible. Beyond this, I’ll leave the ‘ethics’ of sourcing to those with the inclination to concern themselves about such things (and none of my hiring managers are included in that group).

As for ?winning?: I?ve been thumped hard by a number of clients over the years for disclosing their warts to prospective new employees. My response has always been: unless you, the client, enjoy redoing searches, it makes no sense to try to hide baggage that a candidate is going to discover through research, the interview process, or, in the worst-case scenario, within a few days of starting his or her new job.

My clients expect me to quickly locate A players they can?t (or prefer not to try to) find on their own. They expect me to behave while doing so in a manner that results in lengthy retention and sustained top performance, and that insulates them from embarrassment and liability. Beyond that? well, for them, there is no ?beyond that?.

I do however wish to say that it is a pleasure to read Kevin as he speaks to us from a perspective of sanity, reason and values that many seem to be lacking. Unfortunately, it is sad to have to point this out but what Kevin is really asking both recruiters as well as their organizations to do is to think; and from an organizational and leadership perspective, I do not expect to see much of this anytime soon because thinking is heavy lifting.

Much of what I have read is embarrassing and makes me cringe. So may of us hope that recruiting will gain the respect necessary to become a viable and well thought of profession. I sincerely hope that those we need to make this happen are not reading some of what has been posted.

Howard Adamsky