January 22, 2001, 1:29 PM — 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 . . .
Instead of fending off Internet recruiters, IT organizations are increasingly joining them by having their in-house IT recruiters learn Internet recruiting tactics. Craib estimates that approximately 75% of his students are from corporate IT recruiting staffs. Scott G.T. Sloan, director of IT recruiting at Citadel Investment Group LLC in Chicago, is a graduate of the AIRS course.
"I love Internet recruiting," says Sloan. His favorite tactic is data mining competitors' and industry conference Web sites for candidates. "It's cost-effective and makes it easy for me to find the resumes of difficult-to-find people in a relatively short time."
Some of the resumes that Sloan and other internal recruiters find belong to their current IT employees. When that happens, they say, the smartest response is to approach the employee to find out whether there's a job or management issue they can address.
"Keep an open door," advises Sloan, who promises confidentiality to IT employees who bring their troubles to him if they aren't comfortable talking to their managers.
Satisfaction Means Staying Power
In fact, aggressive recruiters say job satisfaction is their biggest obstacle to luring away IT employees.
"It is impossible to poach happy employees," says Barbara Ling, president of RISE Internet Recruiting Seminars in Pelham, N.Y. "Companies should be emphasizing retention."
Keeping IT employees happy isn't a simple proposition. Recruiters say paying market-rate salaries is key -- a hard lesson learned by Kaiser after approximately half of its networking employees left the company last year. A market salary survey showed that while networking position salaries in general had increased 20% to 25% in the past two years, Kaiser's had gone up only 6% to 8%.
Kaiser raised the salaries of the entire networking team by 15% to bring them in line with industry norms, says Roachell.
