It's a free world and if people want to change jobs, they should do it. I'm an HR person and I believe that it's part of any leader's job to glue people to their seats, in the sense that they wouldn't want to work anywhere else. That's our job in HR, too.
I don't believe in shutting people off from the outside world in hopes of keeping them from exploring their career options at any point. That's foolish.
When I worked at U.S. Robotics there were 12 or fifteen people who left the company over a period of a few years whose departures made us really sad. We were very sorry to see these people go. Obviously there were lots more than 12 or 15 people who left the company over the years but there was a small group of folks we were particularly and acutely sorry to lose.
Nearly all of them ended up coming back to work with us again. They had to experience something different and see what else was happening out in the world. That's their privilege, of course.
It's your life and your career and you shouldn't feel that your employer would freak out or hate you if you investigated other opportunities. If you feel that way, that's a reason to change jobs right there.
During the mid-nineties our company was growing insanely fast and a lot of people were trying to poach our employees. The phones were ringing like crazy, and it seemed like there was one headhunter poaching call coming in for every two legitimate business calls.
I don't mean to say that headhunters aren't legitimate, but you have to agree that there is something strange about using a firm's switchboard and telephone system, not to mention the goodwill of its friendly switchboard staff members (back in the days when such jobs existed) specifically in order to reach its current employees and talk to them about other opportunities.
I have great friends who are recruiters, but if we being honest we must also acknowledge that there's a reason the search profession has a not-always-pristine reputation.
We were getting slammed with poaching calls. We couldn't fend the recruiters off. They foiled every attempt we made at using screening questions to send obvious poachers away.
Our front desk receptionist, Donna, talked to me about it. I was VP of HR.
"It's ridiculous, Liz," said Donna. "They call consistently throughout the day. They have the lamest stories, like 'I met one of your engineers, I think a guy named Mark or Mike, at a party, and by mistake I left the party with his sunglasses. I need to reach him to get his sunglasses back to him."
"Oh geez!" I said.
"You wouldn't believe it," said Donna.
"One guy has a pair of sunglasses he wants to return, and the next guy wants to talk to 'any developer, but not a manager' about being profiled in a technology magazine. Because I'm pretty sure that's how writers get their profile subjects when they want to write a story. They call the front desk and ask for 'any developer, but not a manager."
After Donna and I stopped laughing we said "Let's bring up this topic at our R & D meeting. We'll figure it out."
We had a weekly meeting with the R & D managers and other technical folks. We had a standing meeting because we were doing so much technical hiring. That week we brought up the poaching issue. "If people want to look at other jobs, they should," we agreed, "but we don't need their phones to be ringing every three seconds. That's distracting."
We asked our tech folks what they thought about the headhunter calls flooding into our office. "It's always good to know about what's going on elsewhere," they told us, "but the volume of calls is oppressive and the recruiters themselves, when they get you on the phone, are very aggressive. They launch right into their pitch. It's annoying."
We came up with a plan. We created a form (it was paper back then -- could be electronic now) and asked our folks, when they got a call from a recruiter about another job opportunity, to fill out the form.
The form asked for the name of the hiring company -- the recruiter's client, that is -- the name and description of the project the firm was staffing up and lots of other details.
We wanted to know the salaries these other firms were paying. We wanted to know the names of the group leaders and managers in our competitors-for-talent marketplace. We paid our employees fifty bucks for each completed form.
The project worked brilliantly. Filled-out forms flew into HR. We created org charts on the wall for each of our competitors. We knew what they were working on and what sorts of people they were looking to hire to finish their projects. We knew what they were paying.
Some of the recruiters were indiscreet. They told our guys way more than they should have. Then again, our guys kept asking questions!
Here is the lesson in our poaching-eradication program which, in case you were curious, put an end to the inbound recruiters' calls as soon as the recruiters figured out what was up. We would have paid a research firm much more than it cost us to learn what was shaking among our competitors.
We told our employees 'If you go on the interview and if you take the job, you still get paid for filling out the form.' We didn't want anyone to have an incentive not to tell us about an opportunity they'd heard about -- for instance, to keep quiet because they were considering taking the job.
Sometimes they would go on interviews and say "I kind of like the opportunity, so I'm on the fence about whether to go or stay."
I only remember one time when one of our folks went on a fact-finding interview with another firm and ended up taking the job. He was one of the people who left our company and came back a year or two later.
Trust is the key. If you don't trust your teammates, you can't run a business well no matter what else you get right. You can't accomplish anything momentous with people who are only there for the money. There has to be more. If you trust your teammates enough to let them connect to their power source at work, whatever that power source is, then astonishing things are possible.
