The Parasitic Nature of Acquisition

We celebrate the ‘poach’ as if it’s a victory of the will, but it’s actually a failure of the imagination. When your primary recruiting strategy is simply looking at who is doing well at the company down the street and offering them an extra $12,008 to change jerseys, you aren’t being aggressive. You’re being parasitic. You are effectively outsourcing your talent identification, your onboarding, and your foundational training to your rival. You are saying, out loud, that they are better at spotting potential than you are. You are admitting that their culture is a better incubator than yours.

The Shifting Sand of HR

I’ve spent the last 18 days thinking about this, mostly because I’ve been watching Finley A.-M., a playground safety inspector I met during a bizarre weekend seminar on municipal liability. Finley has this way of looking at a gleaming, brand-new jungle gym and seeing nothing but the microscopic stress fractures in the bolts. She told me once that the most dangerous playgrounds aren’t the old, rusty ones everyone avoids; they’re the ones that look perfect on the surface but were built on shifting sand. Poaching is the shifting sand of human resources. You bring in these ‘superstars’ who have no institutional loyalty, who were bought rather than built, and you wonder why, 88 weeks later, the structural integrity of your team is failing.

The Prestige Hire Mistake

There is a specific kind of laziness that infects leadership when the checkbook becomes the only tool in the shed. I’ve been guilty of it myself. I once hired a creative director specifically because he had won a ‘Best in Show’ award while working for our biggest rival. I thought I was buying the award. I thought I was buying the magic. What I actually bought was a person who was burnt out, resentful of the industry, and had already peaked 448 days prior. I didn’t bother to ask if our environment would actually support his style of work. I just wanted the trophy on my shelf. It was a $158,000 mistake that took me nearly a year to fix. The brain freeze I have right now is nothing compared to the cold realization that I had bypassed 18 internal candidates who actually cared about our mission, all for the sake of a ‘prestige’ hire.

The Mercenary Culture

When we rely on poaching, we create a mercenary culture. We signal to our current employees that the fastest way to get a raise or a title change is to go work for the competition for a year and then wait for us to buy them back. It’s a circular economy of disloyalty. We’ve created an environment where the ‘8’ on the end of a salary offer matters more than the mission statement on the wall. And the irony is, the very person you just ‘stole’ is already looking at their phone, wondering which other competitor is going to offer them $28,000 more next June. You haven’t hired a leader; you’ve rented a nomad.

Distorted Reality

I sometimes get distracted by the way the light hits the glass buildings across the street-it’s a shimmering, distorted version of reality that makes everything look more expensive than it actually is. Corporate poaching is that reflection. It looks like growth, but it’s just a distorted image of what your competitor has already built. If you can’t find a way to make your own company the ‘destination’ employer-the place where the industry’s future leaders are forged-then you are effectively a secondary market. You are the outlet mall of your industry.

We spend all our time looking at the ‘plastic’-the resumes, the big-name previous employers, the flashy LinkedIn profiles. We ignore the foundation. A foundation built on poached talent is a foundation built on the highest bidder. There is no grit there. There is no shared history of overcoming obstacles. There is only the transaction.

The Expensive Cycle

Let’s talk about the ‘8’ rule. In my experience, it takes about 88 days for a poached hire to realize that the problems they had at their old job are the exact same problems they have at the new one, just with a different Slack color theme. And it takes you about 238 days to realize that you’ve paid a 38% premium for a set of skills you could have developed internally for a fraction of the cost.

[The strongest companies are those that other people try to poach from, not the ones doing the poaching.]

But when you are the vulture, you’re just waiting for someone else to do the heavy lifting. You’re waiting for the scraps of someone else’s success. It’s a reactive, fearful way to run a business.

The Clarity of Recession

I finally finished my water, and the brain freeze is receding, leaving behind a dull, pulsing clarity. I look at the VP of Sales, still grinning about his new hire, and I wonder if he knows that the competitor he just ‘robbed’ is already interviewing three of our mid-level managers. They’re probably offering them a 28% bump and a fancy new title. The cycle continues, the salaries inflate, the loyalty evaporates, and the only thing that actually changes is the name on the paychecks.

We need to stop equating ‘hiring away’ with ‘winning.’ Until we realize that poaching is a confession of our own inadequacy, we’ll keep paying premium prices for temporary loyalty, wondering why our ‘dream team’ feels like a group of strangers waiting for the bus.