A couple of hundred years ago, if you got caught poaching you could end up being hanged or transported to America or Australia. Nowadays, people go to America or Australia voluntarily without having to kill a rabbit or deer to get there. Hanging is off the table too although, if you do go to the US, there is the prospect of the electric chair (but not for poaching, so far as I know)
Nowadays, the developed world faces a different type of poaching threat which has nothing to do with poor defenceless animals privileged or not to live on a grandee’s land. Instead, we’re talking about people, although we’re not talking about people being snared and clubbed to death, obviously.
Today, we’re talking about what happens when a company casts envious glances at another company’s employee and then decides it might be a good idea to tempt that employee to jump ship. This type of poaching happens all the time either because most companies can’t be bothered to train their own employees to match the one they want or because their own stronger employees have been poached by another rival.
Anyway, poaching is pretty much a fact of life. To counter this trend or at least to make it more difficult to ‘steal’ their employees, companies tend to do things like strictly enforce notice periods which often results in the relevant employee twiddling his or her thumbs on gardening leave for three to six months before joining his or her new company. Some companies even go so far as to adopt an informal ‘no poaching’ agreement between themselves. It’s informal because it would probably be illegal (although, again, not punishable by death or transportation).
Companies also try to prevent the employee who is leaving from using his or her knowledge and contacts to tempt away other employees in his or her wake. This is precisely what computer security vendor Fortinet tried to do when one of its top sales executives, Michael Valentine, left to fill a similar role at rival Sophos in February 2013.
Fortinet claims Valentine signed an agreement when he left which stated: “I also agree that for 12 months from this date, I will not directly or indirectly solicit, induce, recruit or encourage any of [Fortinet’s] employees to leave their employment.” But in a suit filed against Sophos on 16 December, the company alleges the departure of a number of important executives to Sophos in the months after Valentine’s exit were evidence they had been poached in breach of the agreement.
Fortinet also alleges that some of the executives that joined Sophos after Valentine also went on to solicit other Fortinet employees to leave the company despite signing similar agreements to the one Valentine signed.
It will be interesting to see how this story develops. I must say that, looked at from the outside, it would appear quite difficult for a company to enforce an agreement made with an employee once he or she had become an employee of another company. I’m not sure how you can prevent someone from having a conversation with a former work colleague and/or informing them of vacancies in their new workplace that might suit that person. Fortinet obviously recognised the danger this posed by seeking to prevent Valentine and others from doing so, but how can you stop people from talking to each other and something from cropping up in the course of their conversation? Now that hanging and transportation are off the list of preventative measures, I’m not sure you can.
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