6 ms·

>In addition to pings from too-familiar recruiters, there were two cases that left me especially uneasy. In the first case, a former recruiting agency tried to

by phillmv 14y ago

>In addition to pings from too-familiar recruiters, there were two cases that left me especially uneasy. In the first case, a former recruiting agency tried to poach Pete London and then 15 minutes later, wrote to me offering recruiting services! I was being pulled on both ends! What did you expect them to do? It's not even that scummy. It's their business model. I also feel that no poaching agreements are also bullshit. You're just attempting (rationally, I might add) to depress the market for your existing talent. First and for all, especially in the climate we're in, banning two or three recruiting agencies isn't really going to hurt the chances of an employee who could be persuaded to leave. Secondly, if your employee can be persuaded to leave in the first place that's on you, not the recruiter! I haven't had to make my life depend on employees as of yet, but when the time comes I think I'll find it hard to hold it against them. Edit: mandatory notice of: great article, would read again, A++!

hollerith 14y ago
I do not have any ideas on how to disrupt the head-hunting industry, but I have a historical anecdote that might be relevant. In the late 1970s I worked for a contractor who would sometimes hire comp-sci majors to help him. The contractor or small-business person or whatever you call him specialized in developing software for the IBM 5110, which before the IBM PC was the low end of IBM's computer offerings. He told me of another contractor like himself who had an unreasonable client. The client was so unreasonable, IBM got involved in mediating the dispute, he told me. I got the impression that IBM also helped match contractors to clients.
emmett 14y ago
No poaching agreements are not bullshit - you are giving them privileged information (who your best people are) and in exchange you're expecting them to use that information only for the purpose directed. It's similar to an NDA. Nothing bullshit about it.
- phillmv 14y ago
  > you are giving them privileged information (who your best people are) Between linked in, google, your company's about page, github and twitter accounts, you can already figure this out in ten minutes flat. You don't even need to know that in order to recruit people. -- I feel that NDAs are kind of bullshit too, but they're typically not as expressly oppressive. Unless they stretch into noncompetes, which are incredible bullshit.
  - simonw 14y ago
    "Between linked in, google, your company's about page, github and twitter accounts, you can already figure this out in ten minutes flat" I don't think that's true at all. Some of the best engineers I've worked with have had very small online footprints (they're too busy building awesome things at their company to spend much time on Twitter etc). Now that I'm responsible for hiring, I consider knowledge of that kind of person to be incredibly important.
    - dagw 14y ago
      I have to agree here. Most of the best people I've worked with don't have much in the way of twitter and github accounts. Github and twitter only seems popular within a fairly narrow professional and cultural niche.
    - pawelwentpawel 14y ago
      I understand using github/twitter a lot if you're a developer. When you work on something you might want to get some immediate feedback/testers on it. Yet still, linkedin (even though useful) scares me away a little bit. Each single time I get back, I see more and more people inventing longer and more exotic job names and descriptions, pitching around with some void statements and uploading their pictures in suits.
      - nathan_long 14y ago
        My problem with LinkedIn is other people. People want me to say I know them when I don't (hey, networking!). People want me to recommend them when I have only seen them in the hallway and don't even know what they do. I am very conservative about these things. Does LinkedIn's own model disagree? Does it push people towards larger networks, instead of smaller, higher-value ones? Am I doing it wrong, or is (seemingly) everyone else?
- mjwalshe 14y ago
  its colusion and in some places ileagal it also voilates for on the Universal Human rights.
- JoeAltmaier 14y ago
  Poaching is a myth. You assume the only reason your folks are working for you, is they don't know about a better deal elsewhere? Every sensible employee should regard every paycheck as a renewed offer of employment. If a better deal exists, its their choice, not yours, whether they stay or not. Your only real option is to treat employees well, make sure they know you appreciate their talents, and try to generate some loyalty.
  - flyinRyan 14y ago
    Good post. Loyalty in the workplace is also nonsense. We're (mostly) all capitalists here we should act like it. Never ever stay at a company because you "love it" or some childish notion of "loyalty". You should be there because it's the best allocation of your resource of time/knowledge. I don't care about the company I work for and I feel no more loyalty to them then I do an online electronics store. Having said that, my employment has two goals: making me money now and making me money later. This means that I won't leave the company I'm at if someone else offers me $2 more a year. There are a lot of factors that make up my market value and all of them have to be considered. I have left one company to work at another at lower pay because I knew that move would put me in a better position several years down the road, i.e. would increase my market value. I said before I didn't care about companies I work for. Emotionally that's true. Professionally, of course I want them to do well because them failing hurts the value of the time I spent there. I also want to stay long enough to accomplish big things that I can talk about to the next place I interview for. If you go into a relationship where you are more emotionally attached to them then they are to you you're going to get hurt. And a company is just one downsizing away from letting you go no matter how much they make you feel like "family".
    - lsc 14y ago
      >Good post. Loyalty in the workplace is also nonsense. We're (mostly) all capitalists here we should act like it. Never ever stay at a company because you "love it" or some childish notion of "loyalty". You should be there because it's the best allocation of your resource of time/knowledge. This is how I feel... and probably how most entrepreneurs feel. That's why we are striking out on our own. This is not how many employees feel. One guy working for me (at wages I pay) felt actively guilty and apologized to me for interviewing with google. I mean, he'd have gotten a staggering raise if he got the job. (I think he's right on the edge of being good enough; I bet if he practised interviewing and tried a few times, he could make it. Fortunately for me, he failed the first interview, and like a lot of people, he finds interviewing uncomfortable.) I mean, if anything, I feel a little bit proud when my employees go on to much bigger and better things; I don't have money, so I hire people that are just starting, or that have been unemployed for a while and need to start over. I mean, I'd /like/ them to stay with me longer? But if you aren't capable of becoming google materiel, well, I try not to let you past the 'project-based contractor' stage, so it's just plain irrational for me to expect people to stick around for my low wages forever. I absolutely don't understand this. I mean, I don't expect loyalty. (I mean, I expect honesty... but I don't expect anyone to stick around if someone else offers a lot more cash.) But, many employees really do feel something like Loyalty. As a owner, it would be in my interest to put some effort into making those sorts more comfortable. Now, what to do? I don't really understand that feeling of loyalty, so I can't address it directly, but I can say "besides money, what makes these people comfortable/happy? that I can give them and google can't?" - like one benefit I give employees is extreme schedule flexibility. Another is being careful to have an environment where your employees don't feel like they will get fired. (yeah. I don't get this one, either. But it's huge. Normal people are terrified of getting let go. But, I guess large companies do this, too. Of course, instead of giving people severance, when I have to lay people off, I go pester all the recruiters I know and try to get them better jobs.) but yeah. this is something, I think, that we, as entrepreneurs, should study. It's important to understand.
michaelt 14y ago
Well, a lot of recruiters present themselves to employers as helping with their recruitment problems, rather than exacerbating them. The "rational" thing for a recruiter to do is to post fake jobs with huge salaries to jobs boards to get in resumes; and to offload filtering for quality onto clients so as to get more volume through; to shop resumes around clients in descending salary order so lower paying places only get candidates rejected by other employers; and as soon as the contingency fee comes through, to call the employee at work and try to get them to hop somewhere else so you can collect another contingency fee. If all recruiters did this no-one would work with recruiters - businesses only work with recruiters because those recruiters claim they aren't going to act in this ("rational") manner - they claim they're going to look out for the client's interests. For a recruiter to make this claim while simultaneously proving it false shows a bit of cheek, and obviously makes one doubt the sincerity of the claim.
- phillmv 14y ago
  Everything you mention I kind of consider par for the course. How would you even know if your recruiter wasn't doing that? To expect otherwise, I think, is a little naive. The economics of the recruiting business, as you pointed out, reward behaviour ranging from predatory to scummy. The best you can hope for is the guys who are merely sharks, and not scumbags. Yet, the negative aspect you mention, is still contingent on being able to convince people to leave your company. Having talented people leaving your company is a sign you're doing something wrong; you either have a flaw you need to address or you shouldn't be concerned in the slightest. My thesis goes, if all that was keeping someone behind was an unexpected offer out of the blue you had already lost them.
  - michaelt 14y ago
    I'm not in recruitment myself, and I agree that ideally you want your employees not to leave even when contacted by a recruiter! I assume the idea behind refusing to work with recruiters who have been unethical in the past is to create a disincentive, in the hopes of reforming the economics of recruiting so you can get recruiters who will work with you rather than against you. You'd imagine there would be some recruiters who would aim to behave ethically and to cultivate a reputation for being ethical, as that reputation would be valuable to a recruiter in terms of getting clients. The one time I was job-hunting I saw some pretty unethical stuff - I once had a recruiter e-mail me a programming test along with a solution another candidate had submitted, and almost every recruiter asked for a summary of technical interview questions so they could brief other candidates. I would have thought using unethical recruiters would actively hinder your recruitment process - so there'd be no market for their services. I mean, evidently it doesn't work that way, but I think that's the aim of refusing to work with certain recruiters.
robomartin 14y ago
> I haven't had to make my life depend on employees as of yet And that's where your opinion comes from. To be absolutely clear, I am not putting you down. I am merely stating what I believe to be a fact. I see a lot of opinions on HN that obviously come from people who have never actually run a business. Of course, everyone is entitled to an opinion with the caveat that opinions loose a lot of validity when they are not backed by "skin in the game". Bringing an employee onboard is an expensive process. The search itself can be expensive. If you found the employee through an agency you owe the agency a finder's fee. This typically runs from 15% and could be as high as 50% of the employee's salary. To put numbers to that, if you pay someone $100K and the agency charges 25%, you, the employer, owe them $25K. Of course, it doesn't stop there. There's a lot more to employee compensation than the agreed-upon salary and recruiting costs. A quick Google search located this calculator: http://www.artlogic.com/resources/employee-cost-calculator/index.php http://www.artlogic.com/resources/employee-cost-calculator/i... Using that as a reasonable reference I calculated that, if you keep your $100K/year employee for three years your annual cost is $150K per year. If, however, you only keep them for one year (change "Expected term of employment" to "1") the cost goes up to $170K per year. If we look at a $150K/year employee who leaves in one year the cost of that employee sits at around $240K. Even this doesn't paint the entire picture. Bringing someone onboard takes work and will definitely consume clock cycles. More than one team member is likely to be involved in the on-boarding process. Overall productivity will be affected during this period until the new hire comes-up to speed and can "solo" if you will. The effort isn't trivial at all and it costs thousands of dollars for every hire. There's also a hidden "cost" which takes the form of internal competitive data that you have to trust your employees with. Nobody thinks that this is a cost until you go through the experience of training someone for months only to have them go work for a direct competitor. These things do happen, and believe me when I say that it never sits well. At that point thin ethical walls protect you from a competitor gaining a leg-up through ill-gotten insight. This very directly equates to money. The cost of poaching by --presumably-- the very agency you might be working with is also not trivial. You just dedicated a ton of money and time to bring someone onboard and the agency convinces him/her to go elsewhere. Now you are left with a hole to fill, which will take time and money. During that time team productivity will take a hit, product delivery will suffer and you will be distracted away from product and business development in an effort to fill the hole. I can't put a precise number on this but believe me when I say that it ain't cheap. So, yes, anti-poaching is fair and just. For some it takes going through the pain of having this happen once or twice to understand the concept.

by phillmv 14y ago

hollerith 14y ago

I do not have any ideas on how to disrupt the head-hunting industry, but I have a historical anecdote that might be relevant. In the late 1970s I worked for a contractor who would sometimes hire comp-sci majors to help him. The contractor or small-business person or whatever you call him specialized in developing software for the IBM 5110, which before the IBM PC was the low end of IBM's computer offerings. He told me of another contractor like himself who had an unreasonable client. The client was so unreasonable, IBM got involved in mediating the dispute, he told me. I got the impression that IBM also helped match contractors to clients.

emmett 14y ago

No poaching agreements are not bullshit - you are giving them privileged information (who your best people are) and in exchange you're expecting them to use that information only for the purpose directed. It's similar to an NDA. Nothing bullshit about it.

phillmv 14y ago
> you are giving them privileged information (who your best people are) Between linked in, google, your company's about page, github and twitter accounts, you can already figure this out in ten minutes flat. You don't even need to know that in order to recruit people. -- I feel that NDAs are kind of bullshit too, but they're typically not as expressly oppressive. Unless they stretch into noncompetes, which are incredible bullshit.
- simonw 14y ago
  "Between linked in, google, your company's about page, github and twitter accounts, you can already figure this out in ten minutes flat" I don't think that's true at all. Some of the best engineers I've worked with have had very small online footprints (they're too busy building awesome things at their company to spend much time on Twitter etc). Now that I'm responsible for hiring, I consider knowledge of that kind of person to be incredibly important.
  - dagw 14y ago
    I have to agree here. Most of the best people I've worked with don't have much in the way of twitter and github accounts. Github and twitter only seems popular within a fairly narrow professional and cultural niche.
  - pawelwentpawel 14y ago
    I understand using github/twitter a lot if you're a developer. When you work on something you might want to get some immediate feedback/testers on it. Yet still, linkedin (even though useful) scares me away a little bit. Each single time I get back, I see more and more people inventing longer and more exotic job names and descriptions, pitching around with some void statements and uploading their pictures in suits.
    - nathan_long 14y ago
      My problem with LinkedIn is other people. People want me to say I know them when I don't (hey, networking!). People want me to recommend them when I have only seen them in the hallway and don't even know what they do. I am very conservative about these things. Does LinkedIn's own model disagree? Does it push people towards larger networks, instead of smaller, higher-value ones? Am I doing it wrong, or is (seemingly) everyone else?
mjwalshe 14y ago
its colusion and in some places ileagal it also voilates for on the Universal Human rights.
JoeAltmaier 14y ago
Poaching is a myth. You assume the only reason your folks are working for you, is they don't know about a better deal elsewhere? Every sensible employee should regard every paycheck as a renewed offer of employment. If a better deal exists, its their choice, not yours, whether they stay or not. Your only real option is to treat employees well, make sure they know you appreciate their talents, and try to generate some loyalty.
- flyinRyan 14y ago
  Good post. Loyalty in the workplace is also nonsense. We're (mostly) all capitalists here we should act like it. Never ever stay at a company because you "love it" or some childish notion of "loyalty". You should be there because it's the best allocation of your resource of time/knowledge. I don't care about the company I work for and I feel no more loyalty to them then I do an online electronics store. Having said that, my employment has two goals: making me money now and making me money later. This means that I won't leave the company I'm at if someone else offers me $2 more a year. There are a lot of factors that make up my market value and all of them have to be considered. I have left one company to work at another at lower pay because I knew that move would put me in a better position several years down the road, i.e. would increase my market value. I said before I didn't care about companies I work for. Emotionally that's true. Professionally, of course I want them to do well because them failing hurts the value of the time I spent there. I also want to stay long enough to accomplish big things that I can talk about to the next place I interview for. If you go into a relationship where you are more emotionally attached to them then they are to you you're going to get hurt. And a company is just one downsizing away from letting you go no matter how much they make you feel like "family".
  - lsc 14y ago
    >Good post. Loyalty in the workplace is also nonsense. We're (mostly) all capitalists here we should act like it. Never ever stay at a company because you "love it" or some childish notion of "loyalty". You should be there because it's the best allocation of your resource of time/knowledge. This is how I feel... and probably how most entrepreneurs feel. That's why we are striking out on our own. This is not how many employees feel. One guy working for me (at wages I pay) felt actively guilty and apologized to me for interviewing with google. I mean, he'd have gotten a staggering raise if he got the job. (I think he's right on the edge of being good enough; I bet if he practised interviewing and tried a few times, he could make it. Fortunately for me, he failed the first interview, and like a lot of people, he finds interviewing uncomfortable.) I mean, if anything, I feel a little bit proud when my employees go on to much bigger and better things; I don't have money, so I hire people that are just starting, or that have been unemployed for a while and need to start over. I mean, I'd /like/ them to stay with me longer? But if you aren't capable of becoming google materiel, well, I try not to let you past the 'project-based contractor' stage, so it's just plain irrational for me to expect people to stick around for my low wages forever. I absolutely don't understand this. I mean, I don't expect loyalty. (I mean, I expect honesty... but I don't expect anyone to stick around if someone else offers a lot more cash.) But, many employees really do feel something like Loyalty. As a owner, it would be in my interest to put some effort into making those sorts more comfortable. Now, what to do? I don't really understand that feeling of loyalty, so I can't address it directly, but I can say "besides money, what makes these people comfortable/happy? that I can give them and google can't?" - like one benefit I give employees is extreme schedule flexibility. Another is being careful to have an environment where your employees don't feel like they will get fired. (yeah. I don't get this one, either. But it's huge. Normal people are terrified of getting let go. But, I guess large companies do this, too. Of course, instead of giving people severance, when I have to lay people off, I go pester all the recruiters I know and try to get them better jobs.) but yeah. this is something, I think, that we, as entrepreneurs, should study. It's important to understand.

michaelt 14y ago

Well, a lot of recruiters present themselves to employers as helping with their recruitment problems, rather than exacerbating them. The "rational" thing for a recruiter to do is to post fake jobs with huge salaries to jobs boards to get in resumes; and to offload filtering for quality onto clients so as to get more volume through; to shop resumes around clients in descending salary order so lower paying places only get candidates rejected by other employers; and as soon as the contingency fee comes through, to call the employee at work and try to get them to hop somewhere else so you can collect another contingency fee. If all recruiters did this no-one would work with recruiters - businesses only work with recruiters because those recruiters claim they aren't going to act in this ("rational") manner - they claim they're going to look out for the client's interests. For a recruiter to make this claim while simultaneously proving it false shows a bit of cheek, and obviously makes one doubt the sincerity of the claim.

phillmv 14y ago
Everything you mention I kind of consider par for the course. How would you even know if your recruiter wasn't doing that? To expect otherwise, I think, is a little naive. The economics of the recruiting business, as you pointed out, reward behaviour ranging from predatory to scummy. The best you can hope for is the guys who are merely sharks, and not scumbags. Yet, the negative aspect you mention, is still contingent on being able to convince people to leave your company. Having talented people leaving your company is a sign you're doing something wrong; you either have a flaw you need to address or you shouldn't be concerned in the slightest. My thesis goes, if all that was keeping someone behind was an unexpected offer out of the blue you had already lost them.
- michaelt 14y ago
  I'm not in recruitment myself, and I agree that ideally you want your employees not to leave even when contacted by a recruiter! I assume the idea behind refusing to work with recruiters who have been unethical in the past is to create a disincentive, in the hopes of reforming the economics of recruiting so you can get recruiters who will work with you rather than against you. You'd imagine there would be some recruiters who would aim to behave ethically and to cultivate a reputation for being ethical, as that reputation would be valuable to a recruiter in terms of getting clients. The one time I was job-hunting I saw some pretty unethical stuff - I once had a recruiter e-mail me a programming test along with a solution another candidate had submitted, and almost every recruiter asked for a summary of technical interview questions so they could brief other candidates. I would have thought using unethical recruiters would actively hinder your recruitment process - so there'd be no market for their services. I mean, evidently it doesn't work that way, but I think that's the aim of refusing to work with certain recruiters.

robomartin 14y ago

> I haven't had to make my life depend on employees as of yet And that's where your opinion comes from. To be absolutely clear, I am not putting you down. I am merely stating what I believe to be a fact. I see a lot of opinions on HN that obviously come from people who have never actually run a business. Of course, everyone is entitled to an opinion with the caveat that opinions loose a lot of validity when they are not backed by "skin in the game". Bringing an employee onboard is an expensive process. The search itself can be expensive. If you found the employee through an agency you owe the agency a finder's fee. This typically runs from 15% and could be as high as 50% of the employee's salary. To put numbers to that, if you pay someone $100K and the agency charges 25%, you, the employer, owe them $25K. Of course, it doesn't stop there. There's a lot more to employee compensation than the agreed-upon salary and recruiting costs. A quick Google search located this calculator: http://www.artlogic.com/resources/employee-cost-calculator/index.php http://www.artlogic.com/resources/employee-cost-calculator/i... Using that as a reasonable reference I calculated that, if you keep your $100K/year employee for three years your annual cost is $150K per year. If, however, you only keep them for one year (change "Expected term of employment" to "1") the cost goes up to $170K per year. If we look at a $150K/year employee who leaves in one year the cost of that employee sits at around $240K. Even this doesn't paint the entire picture. Bringing someone onboard takes work and will definitely consume clock cycles. More than one team member is likely to be involved in the on-boarding process. Overall productivity will be affected during this period until the new hire comes-up to speed and can "solo" if you will. The effort isn't trivial at all and it costs thousands of dollars for every hire. There's also a hidden "cost" which takes the form of internal competitive data that you have to trust your employees with. Nobody thinks that this is a cost until you go through the experience of training someone for months only to have them go work for a direct competitor. These things do happen, and believe me when I say that it never sits well. At that point thin ethical walls protect you from a competitor gaining a leg-up through ill-gotten insight. This very directly equates to money. The cost of poaching by --presumably-- the very agency you might be working with is also not trivial. You just dedicated a ton of money and time to bring someone onboard and the agency convinces him/her to go elsewhere. Now you are left with a hole to fill, which will take time and money. During that time team productivity will take a hit, product delivery will suffer and you will be distracted away from product and business development in an effort to fill the hole. I can't put a precise number on this but believe me when I say that it ain't cheap. So, yes, anti-poaching is fair and just. For some it takes going through the pain of having this happen once or twice to understand the concept.