Predatory Hiring: The Best Hire Is Your Competitors’ Top Talent

Most salespeople spend a majority of their time trying to “steal customers” away from their competitors. Great recruiters also realize that the best hire a firm can make is a hire from their direct competitors’ top talent! Perhaps an example or two can help to illustrate. I was consulting in New York with a well-known investment banking firm, when they announced to a group of HR managers that they had just hired away the competitor’s best salesperson. The HR people were less than impressed and asked, “But what will he do for us?” The hiring manager shot back immediately with a great quote “I’m not sure, but he won’t be making $50 million a year for the competitor!” Imagine another scenario where you were the Philadelphia 76’ers and you were soon to play the Lakers in the world championships. If you lost the first game, you would hire Kobe Bryant away from the Lakers. If you lost another game you would hire away Shaq. Yes, it might be expensive, but you would flat out win some games! Why Hire Your Competitor’s Talent?

Your talent pool goes up immediately

Theirs goes down proportionately
You can directly learn from their techniques and approaches
You might get a few customers along with the new employee
It forces you to pay close attention to your own top performers in order to keep the competitors from poaching them away
It forces them to pay extra time and resources toward retaining their own employees

Some Actions to Consider

Identify and hire away their most innovative people to slow down their rate of improvement.
When one of your salespeople competes head to head with a competitor and loses the sale, hire away their salesperson the next day.
Ask your own top performers who’s better than them at the competitor and then target them..
Offer an increased referral bonus (bounty) for referrals from key competitors.
Use the names of your competitors in your resume keyword search engine in order to flag and prioritize resumes from that firm.
Ask your new hires on the first day (who came from a direct competitor) who else is good and target them.
Target your competitors’ top recruiters.
Have you recruiters target and hang out at restaurants and watering holes across the street from your direct competitors.
Hire top talent from a competitor whenever you can get them. Hire them as a “corporate resource” and get them on board, even if you don’t have a current opening for them.
Search your competitors promotion and PR announcements for names of top performers to target.
Search industry publications, awards, and conference proceedings for the names of the best at your competitors.
Hire an unbundled search firm to give you the names and profiles of the best.
Encourage your mediocre and poor performers to join the competitor’s team! (joke)

Conclusion I realize that for most HR people predatory hiring is out of the question, because too many HR people are more “social worker” than fierce business competitors. Perhaps this is due to their lack of aggressiveness or courage, or else it’s some misguided set of ethics. But they need to face reality. Business is a competitive game and those with the best talent win. Hiring unemployed people and people from non-competitors has some merit, but generally it pales in comparison alongside the impact of hiring away your competitors’ top talent. Sure, after you hire them you might have some legal constraints on the projects they can work on initially, but in most cases the probabilities are low and the rewards are much higher. In a war there’s only one way win. And that is to fight like warriors! <*SPONSORMESSAGE*>