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This “think piece” is part of a series of articles I wrote to expand your thinking about strategic HR.

If you haven’t seen it in the news lately, there has been an uproar over the practice of secret “no-recruit” agreements between major corporations. A significant number of notable firms including Google, Apple, Intel, and Pixar have been accused of restraining the movement of employees between firms. But don’t be misdirected by all of the legal issues.

The real damage that these agreements can have is on your firm’s business results, and at a large firm, these damages could reach hundreds of millions of dollars. If you work in HR or recruiting, you need to be able to advise senior managers of the unintended consequences related to these agreements. If you currently use no-recruit agreements or you are considering one, this article covers the numerous potential business problems and impacts associated with them.

Potential Problems and Issues Related to Using “No-recruit” Agreements

The 25 problems are broken into two categories, 1) ways that these agreements can hurt your firm and 2) reasons why the agreement may not even work. keep reading…

Few roles could be more important in an organization with deteriorating performance than the roles responsible for crafting a new strategy and the roles responsible for securing the talent that will make that strategy successful.

Climbing wall at Google - Boulder

Firms that have successfully overcome negative momentum and turned their performance around often select new leadership with a proven ability to operationalize a much narrower strategy. They also accept that the talent that was with the organization going into decline may not be the best talent to help pull the organization back up.

Turning around an organization is a tremendous feat, one that involves numerous cultural battles. It’s illogical to assume that any organization in a state of decline could transform itself into the next Apple, Google, or Facebook without dramatic changes to every aspect of its culture. keep reading…

(In this article @ before a name denotes a person’s Twitter name.)

@ValentinoBenito guested on the Recruiting @Animal Radio Show on Wednesday, June 15 and he was regaling the crowd with tales of his past recruiting successes.

Early in the interview he made the broad statement that “Recruiting is pretty straight-forward.”

“Uh-oh,” I thought. “He’s going to rile some up in this crowd.”

What I didn’t expect was for him to explain what he meant so succinctly.

Usually, guests who come on the show and blither on and on about how successful they are get ripped to shreds and given low scores in the one half hour AfterShow that @Jerry_Albright hosts.

That didn’t happen with “Tino.”

It seems a ways back he was tasked to hire engineers on an historically large defense project and one of the companies the customer wanted to see lots of engineers out of was Boeing.

The great need meant that he couldn’t be too picky — he was grabbing engineers with generally correct experience by the bushel.

The customer knew the correct experience resided at Boeing.

They were smart because they were competing for people with other firms who were working on the same huge defense project and they recognized that they were in the midst of a war for talent in which speed was essential to beat the competition.

He was given the green light to offer people (from Boeing) jobs ON THE SPOT. keep reading…

The other shoe is dropping in last year’s anti-poaching case the U.S. Department of Justice brought against six big-name tech firms, and it is falling most heavily on Apple.

The six firms — and a seventh,  Lucasfilm — are facing a class action suit claiming their agreement not to pursue each other’s employees depressed wages and was a violation of California antitrust law.

According to the suit filed Wednesday, Google, Adobe, Intel, Apple, Pixar, and Intuit (the six firms, which were sued and settled with the DoJ), and Lucasfilm agreed not to cold-call each other’s skilled workers. Doing so, the lawsuit alleges, denied workers information about job opportunities, pay scales, and reduced their ability to negotiate.

That much the Justice Department claimed when it settled with the six companies it sued. But it alleged then that the conspiracy was a series of interconnected agreements negotiated between companies. Now, the suit suggests Apple and its CEO Steve Jobs was behind the scheme. Claims the suit:

Defendants’ conspiracy consisted of an interconnected web of express agreements, each with the active involvement and participation of a company under the control of Steve Jobs (currently CEO of Apple) and/or a company that shared at least one member of Apple’s board of directors.

keep reading…

Recruiting leaders tend to be a pretty conservative group, sticking with tried-and-true approaches, tools, and methods. Because they are almost always managing from the weeds, there is little time invested in identifying, testing, and refining new solutions, but that doesn’t mean such solutions don’t emerge.

The inventory of available approaches is quite large, with many solutions existing under the radar. keep reading…

All new hires have the potential of bringing with them game-changing thoughts and ideas, but no matter how rare the talent found, seldom are major business successes ever attributed to recruiting, except in the case of “lift-outs.” While not for everyone (few recruiters have the cojones or the planning skills to attempt a “lift-out”), a lift-out is the pinnacle of recruiting because it has the potential to provide an organization with all of the capability of another organization but without the expense and hassle of a corporate acquisition. It’s a powerful approach. keep reading…

Six leading high-tech companies have agreed to settle an antitrust claim arising from an arrangement among them not to poach each other’s employees.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced the settlement in Washington a few hours ago and simultaneously filed a civil antitrust action. Brought against Adobe Systems, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, and Pixar, the lawsuit details the alleged hiring arrangements. Accompanying the civil complaint was a proposed settlement in which the firms agree not to engage in anti-competitive no solicitation agreements.

The DOJ says the settlement “prohibits the companies from entering, maintaining or enforcing any agreement that in any way prevents any person from soliciting, cold calling, recruiting, or otherwise competing for employees.   The companies will also implement compliance measures tailored to these practices.” keep reading…

You won’t read it in the newspaper, but it’s a fact that the New York Yankees were the world champions of recruiting long before they were declared the world champions of Major League Baseball.

The Yankees are perennial winners (many call them a dynasty) not because of their superior equipment, IT processes, or their financial or marketing prowess, but rather their extraordinary recruiting and talent management strategy.

keep reading…

Hiring salespeople from the competition always seems like a no-brainer, but there are many pitfalls with this hiring strategy.

Life would be grand if we could sprinkle a few seeds in the ground, fertilize, add water … and a great salesperson would sprout. This is truly a pipedream, but one often pursued by small business owners and sales management executives in their quest to find great sales talent. Rather than grow their own, they attempt to steal the crops from their competitors. Why not — their competitor is much better at growing a sales organization than they are. They will grab some magic from their competitor’s land and they too can enjoy great success.

When did the competition begin building a better sales organization than your company? Before you harvest their crop, consider these five myths when hiring your competitor’s salespeople. keep reading…

(the chart in this story was updated February 23)

Once again referrals have turned out to be the leading source of external hires in the annual CareerXroads source of hire survey. In 2008, 27.3 percent of the external hires made by the 45 large employers who completed the survey came from referrals made primarily by employees, but also by alumni, vendors, and others.

Corporate web sites — a destination and not an actual “source,” insists the report — was second with 20.1 percent of the external hires coming from there. Rounding out the top three were job boards, which accounted for 12.3 percent of the hires.

No big news in those results. For the last several years the survey that CareerXroads principals Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler conduct every January has consistently found referrals accounting for about 3 of every 10  external hires made by the participating companies.

What is different this year is that 38.8 percent of all openings were filled by internal transfers and promotions.

“We found that very interesting, ” says Crispin. “That’s the highest number since we started this survey eight years ago.”

His explanation is that despite hiring freezes, critical openings still have to be filled. But, now that’s being done internally and the  jobs the transfers leave are simply being absorbed by the remaining staff.

keep reading…

During tough economic times there is intense pressure on all functions within the business to re-think their current approach in an effort to become more competitive and aggressive all while containing cost.

Unfortunately, many recruiters and recruiting leaders choose an opposite path, becoming more conservative in their approach. When markets head south and fear about economic issues grip the populace, consider a counter-cyclical recruiting strategy that sends a clear message to everyone inside and outside your organization that talent truly means something to your organization.

One controversial yet extremely public, effective outside-the-box recruiting approach you might consider is “proximity recruiting.”

You Must Do Internet and Physical Recruiting

Even with the tremendous growth of Internet recruiting, not everyone is actively surfing the Internet looking for a job or combing through their email in anticipation of your generic form letter introduction.

Reaching a greater percentage of the population relevant to your job searches often requires using at least three channels to reach them, one of which should be physical. The underlying concept of physical recruiting is a simple one, just as robbers target banks because that’s where the money is! Recruiters need to target physical locations where a large number of potential hires can be found.

While nearly everyone in recruiting is familiar with the dreaded job fair, there are numerous other approaches to physical recruiting that are far more effective and fun. One such approach is “proximity” or event recruiting. Proximity recruiting at professional events (tradeshows and seminars) is clearly becoming more mainstream, but one location in particular really elevates the visibility of your efforts and qualifies as “outrageous.” The location? Across the street or in the parking lot of talent-competing firms in trouble.

Proximity Recruiting with a Taco Truck

If you have been paying attention to the business press lately, you are probably aware that Internet giant Yahoo! was planning to lay off approximately 1,000 employees worldwide, the greatest percentage of which would come from its Silicon Valley headquarters in Sunnyvale, California.

What you may not know is that despite a multi-year trend of notable voluntary exits by key employees, Yahoo! is still considered by many to employ some of the greatest engineering talent in the industry. This talent is extremely valuable to hundreds of upstarts working on next-generation technologies.

Yahoo!, like many organizations planning a reduction in force, kept its plans secret until the day when the axe actually swung. Because employees knew pink slips were coming, but no real guidance was offered as to who would be impacted, more people were concerned than would actually be cut.

Seizing on that fear and the actual swinging of the axe, Tokbox, an upstart enabling free voice and video calling over the Internet without any software download, engaged a proximity recruiting strategy that some may consider outrageous.

While pink slips were being handed out, Tokbox executives were setting up a taco truck across the street from Yahoo’s corporate campus, offering employees affected (and anyone else that wanted to chat) a hot lunch and information about employment opportunities.

keep reading…

You would have to be clueless to not be aware of the turmoil on Wall Street these days. Banks, investment firms, insurance companies, and nearly every type of financial services institution is facing severe budget cuts, layoffs, and bankruptcy. This kind of turmoil makes even the very best employees rethink their current employment situation. When people question their future with a firm, it provides an opening for corporate recruiters at stable firms to proactively raid Wall Street and to “cherry pick” the very best away from firms that in the past were literally impossible for most recruiters to crack.

For great recruiters, this is an historic opportunity that can’t be missed. The elite of the elite are teetering — firms that have for decades had their way with the best talent from around the globe. If you haven’t already developed a recruiting plan to poach the best individuals and yes, even intact teams, there is no time to waste.

keep reading…

Microsoft has a clever strategy to recruit away Yahoo! employees. For the most part, Microsoft has successfully relied on its strong employment brand and near-boundless opportunities to attract the best and brightest as opposed to seeking them out.

That is, until recently, when Microsoft raised the level of its recruiting aggressiveness to the point where it would have to be rated an “A” on the aggressiveness scale.

The first indication came prior to the initial merger offer to Yahoo, when its central sourcing team directly emailed recruiting messages to Yahoo engineers, playing on their concerns about Yahoo’s future. Just last week, they ran a full-page color ad in the paper announcing in bold type…“Microsoft has search jobs in the valley”.

There is no secret who the ad was intended for, despite daily defections from Yahoo there is still some top-notch talent inside the company that the competition would love to poach. No subtlety here!

Develop Talent, Hire Talent, or Buy the Competition

In nearly every industry, talent is the primary driver of both a firm’s capability and its capacity to perform. For firms that are growing, either holistically or through industry consolidation/expansion, there are really only three options to ensure access to talent.

Some companies opt to build or develop talent; unfortunately, development is often a “slow” option that provides mediocre results in a fast-changing world.

A second option, growth through mergers and acquisitions, allows the firm to increase its capabilities relatively rapidly as a result of “buying” or merging with a major competitor. It is one of the most common and fundamentally sound business strategies available, and one in constant use around the world. However, M&A is expensive, and often leads to defections of the very key talent you have liked to have retained. Mergers and acquisitions can be hostile or tame, something we have witnessed with Microsoft’s attempt to acquire in recent months.

When M&A doesn’t work, companies have yet another option, one that is less complex, less time-consuming, and much less expensive. This option is to poach away most, if not all, of the talent that provides the competition with its capacity to exist, something Microsoft is obviously doing in a very public way.

The “Neutron Bomb” Recruiting Approach as an Alternative to Mergers

The “Plan B” poaching strategy that firms should consider a feasible alternative to mergers and acquisitions focuses on using strong recruiting approaches to directly “poach away” the target firm’s key employees. This effectively gives you access to all of the capability that produced their intellectual capital without the internal drama that led to the competitor’s chaotic state.

keep reading…

By Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

As the global war for talent continues to manifest itself in an ever-increasing manner of ways, a nasty practice left over from an era long ago continues to handcuff recruiting organizations around the world. The practice we speak of is the gentlemen’s agreement made between two organizations not to poach one another’s employees.

keep reading…

Ever since the unsolicited offer by Microsoft to buy Yahoo, recruiters have been literally “circling” Yahoo in a manner that would have to be labeled as aggressive even by Silicon Valley standards. The tactics vary from the relatively tame practice of “cold calling” into Yahoo in order to find nervous employees to the more aggressive “trolling” by recruiters outside Yahoo’s parking lot and in local spots where Yahoo employees hang out.

Even though Microsoft hopes to gain a significant amount of Yahoo’s talent through acquisition, a number of groups at Microsoft are not waiting. Already on the Internet you can find copies of emails sent by Microsoft recruiters to known top talent at Yahoo, offering them an opportunity to explore a Microsoft career in this time of uncertainty. Those interested in reading one such email can check out this blog posting.

keep reading…

If you are a fierce competitor who wants to practice competitive advantage recruiting, this second part of the article will continue to discuss action steps to take to identify and then counter your competitors’ recruiting actions.

Part 1 in this series introduced the initial three steps for building a competitive advantage in recruiting, which included applying counterycyclical hiring, learning to hire when they’re not hiring, and providing competitive job descriptions. This week, here are 14 more steps to take when building your competitive advantage:

keep reading…

Business is all about head-to-head competition. Firms regularly compete for a limited supply of customers by designing products to outstage the competition, pricing products to undercut the competition, distributing products as close as possible to the customer, and branding them to drive loyalty over time.

In each competitive arena, leading companies strive to develop a competitive advantage. In the marketing and sales departments of major firms, the business environment is clearly understood: it’s a fierce competition of us against them, not just today but everyday.

keep reading…

Few topics in the field of recruiting evoke such strong opinions as the subject of poaching talent, but it is a topic that must be explored further. In the United States, it is clear that a number of corporate recruiters shy away from poaching talent on the grounds that it is unethical to approach and offer possible employment to someone who is already gainfully employed by another organization, such as a direct competitor, despite the fact that the target employee could always just ignore the recruiter’s efforts or opt out at any stage in the process. Given that firms in the United States are typically the most aggressive recruiting organizations, having pillaged other countries for top talent in information technology, healthcare, and the sciences for years, you might assume that the dominant perceptions around poaching talent in the Unites States are similar to those of recruiters abroad. If you did do that, you’d be wrong!

U.S. Perceptions Exist in a Vacuum Two weeks ago, I spoke at ERE’s first European conference, to a crowd of recruiters representing some of Europe’s most recognized companies and a handful of U.S. companies with a strong global footprint. I opted to speak on what I consider the most aggressive recruiting tactic available to corporate recruiters: targeted talent poaching. Prior to arriving in Brussels, Belgium, I prepared for a negative reaction, based on previous experiences with this topic in the U.S. But to my surprise, the reaction wasn’t negative. In fact, one member of the audience spoke up and indicated that poaching had become par for the course, a comment that drew affirmation from the rest of the audience. This caught me by surprise, only because over the years I have worked with a number of European firms, and when compared to firms headquartered elsewhere, their hesitation to adopt aggressive approaches was by far the most resolute I’ve experienced anywhere in the world.

Reflecting on that experience, I realized that it wasn’t out of line with other global experiences I’ve had this year. Throughout 2005, I touched down in eleven countries, mostly in Southeast Asia and Central and Eastern Europe. The perceptions around poaching encountered in Europe could be seen in Australia and New Zealand, where the shortage of skilled talent has threatened the survival of dominant industries. One banking organization was so aggressive that it approached the spouses of targeted candidates while their respective partners were at work to recruit the spouse as a decision influencer. It seems as though the dominant position the U.S. has enjoyed for years in the political/economic landscape has perhaps made our recruiting organizations complacent. As migration to the global economy causes rapid wage inflation in underdeveloped nations such as India, China, and Eastern Europe alongside steady wage deflation in hyper-developed nations like the U.S. and Great Britain, it is clear that such complacency may tip the scales in favor of the developing nations as the war for talent escalates.

A Primer on Poaching

Poaching talent is the practice of proactively targeting and hiring top talent away from a competitor or top firm, with the specific intention of:

• Securing skills or capabilities faster than if you were to attempt to develop talent internally through training and development efforts

keep reading…

Last week I reviewed some of the reasons it is so critical that recruiting directors focus on finding and hiring great recruiters. This week I’ll focus on the actual tools and techniques your firm should use to do just that. Obviously no firm will use every one of these tools, so the key is to scan through them and pick the ones that best fit your culture, your requisite timeframe, and your budget. Some approaches may seem to be too aggressive for your firm. But read on, because the toolkit also covers more conservative approaches. (Note: The tools and approaches with the greatest impact are generally listed first. While this checklist is designed for finding recruiters, it can be easily modified for any position.)

Poaching From Other Firms

The very best recruiters are employed at other firms where they keep their skills up-to-date. Those most relevant to your needs are most likely sitting behind a desk at one of your talent competitors. If you want great recruiters you need to become comfortable with hiring them away from other firms. If your recruiters are resistant to poach recruiters from other firms, fire them on the spot!

1. Ask candidate finalists you lose who the winning recruiter was. When you lose a candidate for a hard-to-hire position to a competitor, call them up and ask them the name of the winning recruiter. Do the same when you hire a recruiter from a competing firm (ask them on the first day who their former firm’s top recruiter was).

keep reading…