[donarb]

He also had access to employee’s personnel files, which included salaries and stock vesting dates. This gave him info on who to recruit and the best time for that employee to leave. That’s a bit different than asking a co-worker if they'd like to quit and join a startup.

[nrp]

That doesn’t sound illegal or especially unethical, and probably in itself isn’t even a violation of his employment contract (though solicitation probably was). If he was deliberately depressing bonuses or promotions to get people to leave, that would be different, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.