Here Comes the Anti-Trust Lawsuit — Finally

Hello?

Anyone see this?

Just when you thought not poaching another company’s employees was the right thing to do – BAM!

You get blindsided by none other than the United States justice system.

All this havoc resulted from this in which the U.S. Justice Department settled in 2010 with Google, Apple, Adobe, Intel, Walt Disney’s Pixar, and Intuit for not “cold calling” one another’s employees.

In their defense, the companies argued that they “LinkedIn” mailed other company employees and contacted (by email) those they found on the Internet. 

“Not good enough,” said the Justice Department.

In other words, you’re not recruiting if you’re not cold calling!

I did a slideshow that mentioned this phenomenon here.

I’m surprised it took the lawyers so long to pull this one out of their hats.

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Now that it’s official and the lawsuit will move forward. it’ll be interesting to see what happens.

Joseph Saveri, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said, “We get to see what really happened,” adding that damages in the case could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Did you hear that?

Hundreds of millions of dollars.

To employees who were (are) damaged because a company decides, for one reason or another, not to “poach” another company’s employees.

Can you still afford not to phone source?

Maureen Sharib has been a “Socratic sourcer” her entire sourcing career; from the moment she first picked up the faxed list of Silicon Valley high-tech companies that was her target list to “phone source” in 1996 to today she has instinctively followed this method of investigative sourcing using (mostly) the telephone.  She is a proponent of sourcing as a synonym for success and envisions the craft moving away from a dangerously drudgery-paced life-form existence to an exciting investigative/competitive place within organizations where practitioners co-exist within a framework of market research, human resources, and C-level future planning. She owns the phone sourcing and competitive intelligence firm TechTrak.com, Inc. You can contact her at Maureen at techtrak.com or call her at (513) 646-7306.  If she’s not on the phone she’ll pick up!

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