Hands Off My Staff!

They're out there. Everywhere. And they want your IT employees. Just ask Mark Roachell, technical recruiter at Kaiser Permanente Health Plan Inc.'s Information Technology Division in Pasadena, Calif. He's one of "them," a recruiter who uses sophisticated Internet search methods to scout potential job candidates.

"I don't consider myself very aggressive," Roachell says. "But the information I find on the Web is very interesting."

Apparently so. That information, he says, includes corporate employee directories, personal resumes, staff names and phone numbers.

If a laid-back recruiter can find all that data on the Web, rest assured that those who are out to openly raid your IT staff are finding lots more.

Consider the mind-set involved:

"You have to be a shark, constantly on the prowl," says Dan Harris, CEO and senior trainer at Recruiters Dream Network in Arlington, Texas.

The quarry that aggressive recruiters hunt these days are the so-called passive candidates -- those IT employees who aren't looking for a new job but who might be enticed away with the right offer.

"A skilled recruiter's job is to create a problem where one may not exist," says Harris. He says good Internet recruiters can match a potential candidate to a position and present it as a dream job. "If the recruiter doesn't come across like a used-car salesman, a reasonable person will listen to a reasonable offer," he says.

Defense Mechanisms

How can an IT organization defend itself against such a reasonable approach to employee poaching?

Some companies are trying technology-based defenses, with only limited success, say Internet recruiters. One recruiter, who asked not to be named, says a company hired him to identify employment-related Web sites. The company then programmed its firewall to block incoming e-mail from those sites -- all 36,000 of them.

Many Internet recruiters say such efforts are wasted, because they'll get to your IT staffers at home if they can't reach them at work.

"Technical protection costs you time, money and effort that you could invest in building synergies between your company and employees so that they don't read solicitations from recruiters," says Gerry Crispin, chief navigator at CareerXroads, an international employment consulting firm in Kendall Park, N.J.

Even stashing employee data behind firewalls isn't a sure safeguard. Savvy Internet recruiters find such information in news articles, white papers, industry association member lists and technology groups.

"It's very difficult for a company to regulate individuals' names on the Web in any meaningful way," says Bill Craib, director of training at Advanced Internet Recruitment Strategies (AIRS) in Hanover, N.H.

If You Can't Beat Them . . .

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