[phillmv]

>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++!

[emmett]

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]

> 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]

"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]

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]

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]

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?

[pawelwentpawel]

There is quite a lot of recruiters/randoms just adding as many people as possible. Without any introductory message, I would just consider that as spam. However, if you know somebody in person but don't know him very well then I don't see a huge problem. I get quite a lot of invites from my former class mates that I had no real connection with. But hey, you never know where your life takes you. Those connections might accidentally come in very useful one day.

As for the recommendations - they've got nothing to loose really. In the worst case they won't get one.

[vellum]

I agree. Github is like a portfolio. But you don't need a portfolio if you're a great developer with a strong network.

[barrkel]

This is really, really not true. Some of (perhaps even most of) the best engineers I've worked with had almost zero public profile, almost to the point of being publicity phobic.

[phillmv]

In retrospect, I was being a little hyperbolic. I too know plenty of developers without an online presence.

Anyhow, my point was, who your best employees are is not privileged information.

[SonicSoul]

care to elaborate exactly how you accomplish this in 10 min? or any other time period?

out of all the great developers i know, 1 has a technical blog (and he updates it very infrequently). Also, how do you gauge if someone is a star based on their twitter or linked in profiles?

[phillmv]

A good 90% of the people I know have linked in profiles. You look at their titles. See who is a friend of the top cheese on facebook, sort by universities. Github is self explanatory, I hope.

[JoeAltmaier]

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]

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]

>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.

[flyinRyan]

I think just letting your employees know that you go to these lengths to help them if you wind up with no other choice but to let them go will be at least as valuable as "job stability" (what ever that means these days).

[lsc]

Every boss talks like he's going to take care of you, and (I hope) it sounds like the bullshit it is to most people. (when I hear a boss saying he's going to take care of me, I hear "I want you to do more work for me for no additional compensation") But, if when you do fire someone you do get them a better job? that person will talk, and it won't be regarded as bullshit... and you can do a lot worse than hiring people recommended or evaluated by someone that you /know/ is good.

[wilmoore]

It is times like this that I wish for multi-upvotes.

[mjwalshe]

its colusion and in some places ileagal it also voilates for on the Universal Human rights.

[michaelt]

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.

[flyinRyan]

If a certain action would mean no one works with you then that action isn't rational, right?

When you talk about finders fees, then yes it would stand to reason that an agency would want to get as many of those as they can but they have to do so in such a way as to not appear to supply flaky people.

Agencies also generally place contractors and in the case of a contractor they ideally want to place the worst worker as high as they can. And when I say "worst" I mean "worst at negotiating for salary". That is, they'd like to hire you out to a big bank for $1k/day and convince you that $200/day is a lot of money so they can pocket $800/day on you. If that sounds bad, I've heard of worse arrangements. In any case, whatever they get the contractor in they're going to want to keep them there as long as possible so they can continue to earn off them.

If you want to stop the agency who placed with you from poaching your permis then you should insist on paying the finders fee over some time period. This avoids the need for immoral and unenforcable "no-poach" contracts and but gives the recruiter incentive to keep the employee in place. Especially if you arranged payments so that payments get larger later in the employment cycle.

Hmmm, maybe someone should make an agency and try this model. :) But if you do be careful because companies will try to flip it the other way: e.g. fire and re-hire the employee early on to avoid further payment (which is probably why agencies demand the fee up front now).

[phillmv]

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]

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.

[hollerith]

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.

[robomartin]

> 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/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.

[overgryphon]

An employee that leaves after a year has decided that they do not want to work for you. This employee is sacrificing a year's worth of work mastering your processes, environment, and code base in order to go start over somewhere else where they need to learn a new code base.

A couple thousand dollars isn't enough to convince most people to start over- something about their current work place made leaving seem attractive. Either the job does not fit them well or have reasonable paths for advancement (both from a development and career perspective), you are underpaying the employee, the work/social environment is bad, or something significant in their personal life has changed (graduating college, spouse got a job somewhere else, ect).

Poaching isn't unfair. You never have any guarentee for how long an employee will work for you, just as your employees have no guarentee they will still have their job tomorrow. The problem in the above situation isn't poaching; the problem is the employee wanted to leave.

[flyinRyan]

I've employed people and hope to again soon and the conclusion to your post is 100% wrong. All the costs you mention are your problem. Finding talent is expensive. But it's expensive to everyone. You're spending all that money to find someone willing to invest their precious time and skill/knowledge with you instead of spending that value some other way. That doesn't make them your slave. You don't get any special rights because you spent money.

If you want to keep people give them a compelling reason to stay. Collusionary practices like anti-poaching, Noncompetes and so on are not fair and just. They are immoral and bad for the markets. Engaging in any of these practices should come with hefty fines.

[robomartin]

And your creative interpretation of my post is 100% wrong.

This isn't about an unhappy employee leaving because the job is crappy. Of course not. If the job or the environment is crap I'd be the first one to say that they probably ought to leave.

I am also deeply offended by your use of the term "slave". Nobody has used this term. Not one person has even implied it. I certainly have not. It is a despicable and desperate measure to sensationalize something that has, in no way whatsoever, implied such a condition exist or is desirable.

My post, and the scenario that it referred to, was very narrowly focused on the case where an agency YOU HIRE to help you find talent turns-around and proceeds to attempt to poach the very talent they helped you find just a few months after they got onboard. That is scummy and, in my view at least, absolutely justifies a no-poaching agreement WITH THE AGENCY YOU HIRED TO HELP YOU FIND TALENT.

Other than that, if another company is going to reach out and offer your employees a better deal (whether that means more money, a more interesting project or better working conditions) so be it, that's the free market and nothing should impede that at all. Even if other agencies reach out and convince the employee to leave a week after he/she came onboard, that's OK.

Again, the point here is very narrowly defined around the issue of a head-hunter that YOU hired turning around and poaching employees you just got done paying them a fee to find. That is a very different issue, isn't it?

In order to fully illustrate the damage done I simply highlighted that there are huge costs involved in hiring and employing someone, particularly through a head-hunter, and that it is wrong for them (the head hunter) to then turn around and try to steal people away from you.

After a reasonable and mutually agreed-upon period they can do whatever they want. In the example given in the OP's article that period was 18 months. That's fine.

To be ultra-redundant: If someone other than the agency you hired manages to pull someone --anyone-- away from you, that's fair game. You can do that to others as well as they can do it to you. The issue here is with an agency that is supposed to be working for you.

[kimmel]

> I am also deeply offended by your use of the term "slave". Nobody has used this term.

When I read slave I immediately jumped to 'Wage Slavery' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery and it happens all the time. People cannot leave their job or risk looking for a new one because they are living pay check to pay check.

That is what I took away from that statement.

[flyinRyan]

Well, I'm glad you're at least reasonable about the employees rights (many people aren't!) but the issue is (as I referred to in another post): the agency you hire to help you find talent is in a field that can only make money with high volumes. What you and the article author are taking personal isn't. The agencies aren't going "muhahahaha! Now that we've placed Rockstar 275 at robomartin's company let's poach them!". They simply have the person they found for you in a database and when ever they get a new job or haven't filled an existing one within a certain amount of time they're going to connect with everyone that their DB report says matches the profile.

They don't know and they don't care who they've placed where (at least the part of the company that sends out these "poach" emails doesn't). A new employee isn't going to jump ship within a month of getting a new job unless a) they really hate the new job or b) the new offer blows them away to the point of being willing to burn bridges.

I suppose agencies could put some kind of filter in their DB to not let people under no-poaches show up in the results, but why bother? Every company probably has a different no-poach period and all kinds of bothersome clauses they want and it nearly never comes up anyway so it's not worth the effort to deal with the issue. It easier to worry about these things on an exception basis, e.g. employee answers back with interest. At this point we can check if there is any reason we shouldn't go forward. But they will be sending out so many emails, most of which will be ignored, there's just no point thinking about it until someone actually answers.

This is simply a classic case of assuming there is malice where in truth there is just laziness.

[robomartin]

There are so many ways to look at this. Here's a dumb and imperfect example: You hire me to help you find a really good CFO. I charge you $40,000 to get that job done. After several weeks and two dozen interviews we find a candidate that is a great fit. You agree to pay her a very competitive salary, one that is certainly within the top level of what CFO's are getting paid in your industry. Everyone is happy. You pay me my $40K and she comes onboard.

Six month later I get pinged by a large corporation looking for a CFO. I remember the candidate I placed with you. She is definitely qualified. I email her directly and get her to jump ship. She didn't get paid any more. I simply convinced her that the large corporation was a better bet than your startup. I, of course, get to collect a fee from the large corp as well.

This is wrong. You hired me to help you build your team and paid me handsomely to do my job. If I then turn around and actually become your enemy, why am I serving? An even such as the one I just described is incredibly disruptive and costly beyond the obvious (I covered some of the costs in my prior post).

That why I will not work with any head-hunter who will not guarantee that they will not approach new hires with new opportunities for a reasonable period of time. As a business you don't derive a financial benefit out of hiring a new employee for months but there's a ton of upfront and ongoing investment.