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by hristov 5444 days ago
I never really understood talent acquisitions. They are still puzzling to me. If you only need the talent why pay for the company? A huge chunk of the money you are paying for a company goes to the investors.

Why not just offer the people that you like multi-million dollar signing bonuses and have them join you. But what if they want to stay in the company and believe in their product, you say. Well if that were the case why would they agree for their company to be acquired in a deal that shuts down their service?

I don't know, I must be missing something.

1 comments

Perhaps your puzzlement comes from a lack of exposure to all the variables? Not being critical here, I don't know anything about your background.

For some people, they have a demonstrated level of competence which allows them to work on what ever they are passionate about. If that is combined with a modest disregard for money such that they work somewhere because they are passionate, and for any salary as long as it meets some base level. If you want to hire them it is effectively impossible.

You have recruiters call them, they brush them off. You invite them to conferences and schmooze them with all the great things going on at BigCorp and they thank you politely for the invite and don't call back. You shower them with flattery, gifts, whatever and they persistently ignore you.

But if they get passionate about an idea and start a company around it and work day and night to breathe life in it, and more importantly take outside money, then BigCorp gets a chance. If BigCorp can convince the investor(s) to sell them the company they can move this thing you are passionate about into their company and have this star entrepreneur follow it.

Then there is a somewhat less sensational side, you've started a company and you've convinced people to invest, people who are now your friends, and it hasn't turned out quite the way you hoped it might. Perhaps the timing is off, or there was some gotcha you thought would be insignificant but turned out to be much more difficult, or maybe someone turned up a patent or something that makes your idea impossible to implement. Maybe its as simple as customers are willing to pay you what you need to make in order for you idea to be a viable business. You've got talent, you demonstrated an ability to execute, but your investors aren't going to come in on another round of funding because they, like you, no the concept as planned is dead.

You are friends with these folks (your investors) and you don't want to screw that up, so if BigCorp comes along and buys the company which pays off the investors, you get to keep your friendships intact, BigCorp gets to put some golden shackles on you for some period of time, and you get to try again after the shackles come off.

The short of it is that its rarely successful for a large corporation to 'poach' employees by luring them away with promises of better pay and more regular working hours.