Employee poaching

By on January 2, 2012

Employee poaching is a common phenomenon in today’s corporate scenario. Human resources are critical to the success of an organization. Therefore every company wants to hire the best. The competition is intense and the availability of talent is limited.

Moreover, the companies across the globe are facing the serious problem of attrition. All this has compelled organizations to get the people with desired skills from whatever sources available. The organizations are now making aggressive moves to get the best talents available in the marketplace and seeing the need of the hour, the question of ethics is also kept aside several times. Employee poaching has emerged as a major human resource challenge in recent times.

Why employee poaching?

Employee poaching means the act of hiring the best talents of competitive firms. It can also be described as targeting the competitors’ pool of talent. Poaching is done to get the trained, experienced and most talented employees of competitive firms. It is sometimes considered to be the easiest way of securing people who possess just the right kind of skills for the operations of the company. This saves the recruitment and selection costs, training and induction costs of the company because poaching supplies the candidates who are already trained in similar kind of operations. Poaching is also done with a view to get an insight of competitors’ activities.

Employee poaching hits hard

Losing employees to competitors is a critical issue in corporate parlance today and is a major cause behind high attrition rates. The companies are taking steps to retain their best employees by giving them a salary hike, better career opportunities, flexible work settings to help them maintain a family-job balance, conducive work environment, better leisure facilities etc. But in spite of these efforts, a major portion of employees leave the organization as soon as they get a better offer from a competitive firm. The companies lure employees of competitors by offering attractive jobs and incentives which causes frequent job switch overs.

Employee poaching is common in IT industry because this industry demands technical skills from employees. The unskilled labor is easily available but technically competent people are still hard to find. Though the market is flooded with people holding degrees in IT, the real talent is limited. This makes companies to go for stealing the competitors’ talent. Employee poaching can only be controlled by developing strong relationships with the employees so that they think twice before deciding to resign.

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