Think about it. You’re Google, Apple and Yahoo. You’ve all got great brands at various stages in the brand life cycle, but the thing that drives you nuts is when you poach each other’s employees. Sure you feel great at Google when you lift a design person from Apple, but then you look up and Apple’s lifted a premium web developer from the Google team.
So, at some point, your CEO says “enough”, and directs the COO to put a call in to the other megabrands. The message? “Why are we stealing each other’s employees? Let’s make a deal not to lift talent from each other, because at the end of the day, we can agree not to poach and fill our needs elsewhere in Silicon Valley from all the smaller companies – and the bigger ones that don’t have our employment brand attractiveness. We’re all supermodels – so let’s agree to pick talent from the ugly kids, not each other...”
Quick – is that an anti-trust violation? The Justice Department thinks it might be. More from the Washington Post:
“The Justice Department has launched an investigation into whether some of the nation’s largest technology companies violated antitrust laws by negotiating the recruiting and hiring of one another’s employees, according to two sources with knowledge of the review.
The review, which is said to be in its preliminary stages, is focused on the search engine giant Google; its competitor Yahoo; Apple, maker of the popular iPhone; and the biotech firm Genentech, among others, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.
“This could be collusive restraint on trade, which could have a serious impact on competition,” said Albert Foer, president of the American Antitrust Institute. Such an agreement would underscore the fierce competition over top engineering and business talent.
Google has long been known for its exhaustive recruiting process to find people who fit into its culture and create innovative Web technologies. In 2005, Microsoft sued Google for hiring away Kai-Fu Lee, Microsoft’s vice president for Web Interactive services, to head Google’s operations in China.”
What say you? Is that an anti-trust violation. Interesting that the one dominant tech name you don’t hear included is Microsoft. It’s OK to agree not to poach each other’s talent, but let’s pillage Redmond as much as we can?…
For my money, the common board relationships at Apple and Google make for an interesting backdrop, but it’s hard for me to believe that companies couldn’t resist picking off a great engineer from one of the listed companies if they had a chance.
The truth? It’s lying on a Microsoft Exchange server somewhere, right?
Kris,
actually Microsoft is a part of the investigation as well – somehow many have missed that, but see – http://www.bizjournals.com/portland/stories/2009/06/01/daily41.html
Is it anti trust? well, let’s take a certain situation where one of the Aforementioned companies decided to Raid a full Team of Engineers from one of the Small but quickly rising upcoming competition, stopping them in their tracks.
That same company has also be known to hire the employees from smaller competitors just to “impede business” – as one of their representatives once wrote in an article a few years ago when discussing how great it is to have a “war for talent” — No, they had no need for the employees, they just wanted to slow down or harm further growth of their competitor.
Or we can look at the recent Anti Trust Case against intel which = 1.45 BL dollars fine.. Intel doing Everything in their power to make sure that they “skewed competition and denied consumers a choice for chips.”
When companies will make sure that they will attempt to make sure that they are the foremost in competition, trying to create an Oligopoly they the small business, which ultimately harms the consumer. It will eventually harm the economy as a whole. It is a trickle down effect. Something I call Reaganomics in Reverse.
A good example of this can be found surrounding our economy, and the financial and auto markets.
As recruiters and HR, hopefully we will look more at Quality, not Quantity, and not so much about immediate results, but long term effects on the company we represent
Wow – after reading Kris’s comment – charge ‘em!