The Cost and Benefit of "Poaching" | workforce.com

The Cost and Benefit of "Poaching" | workforce.com: "The Cost and Benefit of “Poaching”

Workforce planning and noncash incentives can minimize the cost of pulling talent away from competitors.
By Fay Hansen irect recruiting from competitors, customers and vendors can produce a high-performance workforce. It can also break the bank. In recent discussions, however, a series of questions about the ethics of 'poaching'--the misnomer often used in the recruiting industry--have overshadowed the more fundamental issues of costs and benefits.

The ethics questions can be disposed of in the same terms that apply to most business practices, according to Charlie Jones, vice president of process and operations at Yoh, a technical and professional staffing firm that recruits heavily from competitors and companies in related industries. 'If recruiting involves misrepresentation or deceit, it’s unethical,' he says. 'It’s just that simple.'

Yoh constantly recruits to maintain its own internal staff of 350 employees plus 5,500 contract employees on assignments with clients. The interesting fact about Yoh is not that it engages in direct recruiting without ruse phone calls or covert practices, but that it recruits passive midcareer candidates from competitor firms without moving beyond market wages.

Direct recruiting is expensive. Yoh has minimized the pain by developing a package of noncash or intangible premiums focused on career development that pull in new employees without setting off bidding wars.

Those bidding wars are by far the largest expense involved in direct recruiting, and when they force internal equity adjustments, the costs can be huge. In addition, direct recruiting almost always involves an investment of time that goes well beyond the more simple techniques of advertising jobs and sifting through résumés.

But these higher costs may be offset by the benefits of bringing in talent with industry-specific skills and experience. A"