If you Cannot Hire the Best then Give them Away

In yesterday’s blog I discussed some of the advantages of setting up a network composed of your suppliers, customers and non-competitors for talent management purposes (co-petition). Well today I want to share one of my past strategies for using this network.

Over the years when my team and I sourced key talent on behalf of my employers, I came across many great candidates who worked for our biggest competitors. These candidates were always a phenomenal challenge as they were in high demand, heavily compensated and usually working on leading edge projects. Many of them were also working with highly financed start up’s or with mid sized companies with media buzz. My team and I won many of the battles for some of these candidates but we also lost our share. At the end of these exchanges my team and I reviewed the odds of being able to hire these candidates in the future and if we could potentially hire them we would tag them in our system for future recruiting purposes and for candidate management. If on the other hand our odds were low, we would identify whom from our client, customer or non-competitor base was in the best position to hire these candidates away from our competitors.

The loss of key resources at our competitors created some great opportunities for the companies I worked with, while putting our competitors at a severe disadvantage due to knowledge loss and the long cycle to recruit key resources. The good will created with our customers and suppliers also helped cement long standing relationships.

Note that all candidates acknowledged upfront in the recruitment process that they would be willing to be considered by other companies in their job search. In this way we respected the various privacy and legal policies in different countries and jurisdictions. Do not do this on the cheap, get proper legal and branding advice and always involve your account teams when dealing with clients and suppliers.

If you would like to know more send me an email at fguay@rogers.com