5 ........................Chennai Chapter Report 6 ... - National HRD Network

There has been a shift in the practice of
talent management. The shift is from
talent running after organizations to
organizations running after talent. As a result,
Talent Poaching has become predominant
and the order of the day. Talent Poaching is
the act of enticing key employees from one
competing firm to another. It is the practice
of proactively targeting and hiring top talent
away from a competitor or top firm, with the
specific intention of:
Securing skills or capabilities faster than
if you were to attempt to develop talent
internally through training and
development efforts
Securing expanded capacity (i.e. more
bodies) that will require less ramp up
time and
Mitigating high-level talent losses due
to attrition
I had been personally nagged by a question
whether Talent Poaching is an acceptable
and a healthy practice. I carried out a study
to find answers to these questions. The
study focused on getting the views of Human
Resource Managers on Talent poaching.
Forty eight Human Resource Managers
were interviewed to collect the data for the
study. The respondents belonged to various
business sectors. The respondent
composition of different sectors is:
seventeen from IT & ITES, eight from
Manufacturing, seven from Banking, six from
Services, five from Educational, and five
from Pharmaceutical sectors.
The respondents were asked the
following questions by the author.
1 What are your views on being a
'poacher' and 'poached'?
2 Is talent poaching ethical?
3 What are the merits of talent poaching?
4. What kind of people do online recruiters
or online poachers target?
5 Should 'no poaching agreement' be
considered seriously?
Let us have an understanding or poaching
practices before we take up the discussion
of the data gathered. There are three
dominant Poaching Strategies. They are:
Direct sourcing. Firms use new datamining
techniques and tools, combined with
age-old recruiter phone techniques, to mine
Talent Poaching: Views
the organizational structure, employee
identities, and employee performance
indicators of talent and product competitors.
This competitive intelligence is later used
to determine who specifically should be
targeted for poaching. All work is carried out
internally.
Third-party poaching. This strategy relies
on using a vendor or series of vendors to
identify everything from which firms to target
to what individuals to go after based on your
strategic objectives. It is also by far the most
common way organizations that find
poaching unethical actually practice it
themselves. In their views, poaching is
perceived as unethical only if you do it
yourself.
Attract them with "honey." The third
strategy is the one that a few organizations
would associate with poaching, what is
called "attract them with honey" strategy.
This approach utilizes different channels to
drive candidates to your organization from
other specific organizations, much like
product firms steer you to their products in
grocery stores.
Discussion
It is found from the analysis that talent
poaching is the highest in IT & ITES sector
and the lowest in Banking sector. The
percentage composition of different sectors
is: 50% in IT & ITES, 14% in Services, 11%
in Manufacturing, 10% in Educational, 9%
in Pharmaceutical and 6% in Banking
sectors.
Talented people, 'On being poached', look
for job satisfaction and sense of recognition
besides astronomical salaries. There is their
justification for being poached. Talent
hunters look for, 'on being a poacher', smart,
innovative and co-operative people as their
workforce. There is their justification on
being a poacher.
Employee poaching is accepted as an
ethical practice in this modern business
world as it is next to success and profit. Most
of the respondents expressed that poaching
was not unethical as the practice had been
widely accepted as part of the business and
moreover, every body was at it. For them
the practice is unethical only if employees
move ahead of the bond agreement. It is
also beneficial from both the employer and
employee point of views as the objectives
are personal success on the being poached
and organizational success on being the
poacher respectively. The analysis of the
data (chart-1) shows that 78% of the
respondents expressed that poaching was
R Krishnamurthi is Asst Professor, Jansons School of Business, Coimbatore. Mail: Jckrish@yahoo.com
– R. Krishnamurthi
ethical while 15% the respondents said that
it was unethical and 5% of them were not
sure.
Chart-1 Is Poaching Talent Ethical?
15%
7%
78%
Yes
No
Not Sure
The respondents had their justification for
poaching talent as the practice of poaching
talent has reduced investment on employee
training considerably. This was because
they were able to get the top talent that they
were looking for and the top talents were
equipped with the required skills and
qualities.
It has also been analyzed that top
companies target employees with high IQ,
adaptability, innovation, smart working and
fast learning. Majority of the respondents
were confident that hiring only the confident,
smart and hard working would lead to the
success of a new organization and not mass
hiring.
'No poaching agreement' is merely a fad and
that cannot be followed strictly. By signing
the 'no poaching' agreement, employees are
forced to work with no interest which creates
conflict, time delay in work process,
counterproductive behavior of employees
which further creates an unhealthy
environment inside the organization. That
will force the top management to spend time
and energy in settling disputes. Today's
organizations do not have room for 'fire
fighting'. The top managements have
intelligently understood that by creating
employee engagement, providing extra
allowances like residence, travel, medical
and educational facilities, and maintaining
a smooth relationship with the employees
will help organizations retain their
employees.
Conclusion
From the analysis of the survey conducted,
it is concluded that in today's business world,
employee poaching is considered ethical by
majority of the respondents for it being
beneficial both for the employer and the
employee as both aim for their success and
wealth maximization in a shorter period of
time. The practice can be accepted as long
as employers and employees strictly adhere
to their written agreements.
H
| HRD News Letter | April 2008, Vol.24, Issue:1 31