Poaching

Poaching: Poaching talent is the practice of proactively targeting and hiring top talent away from a competitor or top firm, with the specific intention of:
Securing skills or capabilities faster than if you were to attempt to develop talent internally through training and development efforts
Securing expanded capacity (i.e. more bodies) that will require less ramp up time
Mitigating high-level talent losses due to attrition
Damaging your competitors' ability to achieve their strategic objectives

Poaching activities largely fall into one of three categories:
Direct sourcing: Firms use new data-mining techniques and tools, combined with age-old recruiter phone techniques, to mine the organizational structure, employee identities, and employee performance indicators of talent and product competitors. This competitive intelligence is later used to determine who specifically should be targeted for poaching. All work is carried out internally.
Third-party poaching: This strategy relies on using a vendor or series of vendors to identify everything from which firms to target to what individuals to go after based on your strategic objectives. (It is also by far the most common way organizations that find poaching unethical actually practice it themselves. In their minds, poaching is perceived as unethical only if you do it yourself.)
Attract them with "honey": This approach utilizes six different channels to drive candidates to your organization from other specific organizations, much like product firms steer you to their products in grocery stores. The "honey" strategy is powered by a number of channels that drive candidates into your recruiting process.
Employment branding
Employee referrals
Event recruiting
Magnet hiring
Boomerang hiring
Internet

The Employment Branding Channel
Many firms that have made an attempt to manage their employer brand do so with no particular goals other than to develop either "Best Place to Work" or "Employer of Choice" status (note that both of those terms are registered trademarks!). Such efforts are, for lack of a better word, lame. Employment branding is not an art, but rather a science. It focuses on identifying which employer attributes and characteristics are needed to recruit a highly defined target audience, aligning organizational structure and management practices with those attributes where possible, and communicating both directly and indirectly with the target audience to position the organization as a leading firm providing those attributes. Employer branding relies on:
External recognition as a leader in providing specific employer attributes, such as a value on diversity, innovation, or talent development
Consistent messaging that continuously communicates who and what the firm is and what value it provides to prospective employees
A story inventory that provides specific examples of how management programs and practices deliver value to employees
A specific and differentiated theme (slogan) that competitors cannot easily mimic or assert
Recognition for functional excellence
Lots of lots of press coverage in very specific publications that reach into the targeted audience

The Employee Referral Channel
Just as most firms approach employment branding with no specific goal or outcome in mind, they often develop employee referral programs that meander and produce mediocre results at best. A targeted employee referral program, on the other hand, utilizes the employee population to do all of the competitive intelligence mining that enables targeted poaching, with an added benefit: It gets employees to utilize their personal networks to initiate the recruiting process. A targeted poaching effort that utilizes the employee referral channel relies on:
Active referrals: An approach that goes to employees with a specific set of questions that prime them to remember who they know in specific roles, organizations, etc.
Top performer referral prioritization: An approach that acts on all referrals coming in from proven top performers before acting on those from other employees
Reference referrals: An approach that contacts references of past hires that proved to be top performers and asks who else they know
Stakeholder referrals: An approach that leverages non employees who have a vested interest in the success of the company to generate referrals, such as consultants, suppliers, stock holders, etc.

The Events Channel
Nearly every organization that recruits will attend at least one event a year, be it a recruiting event, an industry trade show, or a vendor exposition. But few select events to participate in based on their probability of attracting employees from specific competitors. Utilizing events as a poaching channel relies on:
Identifying and participating in specific industry trade shows or association events that have a proven attraction to employees of targeted competitors
Hosting onsite seminars and certification courses that are attractive to the competition
Participating in non-industry/non-professional events that attract a target audience, such as a beer and wine or arts festival.

The Magnet Hire Channel
The magnet hire channel is quite possibly the easiest one to understand. It simply relies on polling top performers to identify the most respected or most visible professional who they would be interested in working with, and then working to hire that person in hopes that they would attract others to your organization.

The Boomerang Channel
At some point in time, nearly every employee decides to make a change and severs an employment relationship. The boomerang channel is used in poaching by identifying former employees that are currently employed by a competitor and developing specific strategies to lure them back — which brings the added benefit of lots of competitive intelligence about organizational structure and management practices, but not trade secrets or product information.

The Internet Channel
The final major channel that is used to power the "honey" approach to poaching is the Internet channel. Unlike job posting and data mining, these approaches use the Internet to develop resources that employees of competing organizations are drawn to.