If you want to hire someone, hire them. If an employee leaves, let them leave. No hard feelings. If you really don't want them to leave, offer them more. Preferably do that before they think about leaving. This sort of unfair limitations on employee's employability is or should be illegal.
Just ask your friend. In 99% of cases, it's okay to ask. I mean if the guy or the girl want to leave, your friend is gonna to tell everything you need to know, what matters. And maybe, you aren't gonna to hire him because he is actually terrible or maybe your friend will just say he is fantastic and give you a green light.
> It is important to note that just about all of these kinds of policies violate the Right to Work laws in California.
There is no right to work in California. [1] It's the actual opposite. Coming from a VC, that's shameful.
Edit: It's not actually very relevant to this discussion but to the extent that it is, the fact that California does NOT have such a law means that workers have more rights than states that do.
Being straight with the employee and your friend is the best policy.
You shouldn't mix business with friendship why would you care why the employee is leaving that's none of your business just give your friend a heads up so he can do something about it.
I'm sure he will appreciate it.
I think this is an interesting aspect about business reasoning that a lot of people don't understand. Even though another comment here points out this isn't correct. If something is illegal and carries a risk of large fines or a large civil judgement, that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it necessarily. It just means that you have to weigh that potential cost against the benefits of doing it. If the benefits are greater, you go ahead and pay the fine or the litigation as a cost of doing business.
You don't change the way companies operate by going on about whether something is right or wrong. You have to introduce a cost larger than any potential benefit. If not hiring person X costs you a couple hundred thousand dollars in a civil judgement, but helps you keep a business partnership that's worth hundreds of millions in revenue, you'd have to be crazy to go ahead and hire someone from a business partner in those circumstances.
I don't think anything is particularly arbitrary or contradictory about that idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_fallacy
Just because there is no sharp division between two states, doesn't mean they don't exist to begin with.
Quantity has a quality all its own
Your friend starts a company, you become friends with his employees. Eventually you start a company a really want to offer an amazing opportunity to one of your new friends but you don't because why?
Why are you denying someone the choice? It seems almost immoral that you wouldn't give her the choice and instead deny her the opportunity just because she happens to be employees by another friend
What if you had no faith that your friend's company would survive? Does that change your mind? What if you thought your friend's company would survive but never be more than limping along whereas you had faith that your company would become huge?
I ran a company,this issue came up when a friend asked if it was ok to poach from us. My first reaction was to think "no way" but my partners pointed out denying our employees opportunities was wrong. Fortunately none of them left.
Grow the fuck up or do not run a company. Childish viewpoints are for the playground. If your friend can't deal with the fact that you offer a more attractive work environment, he or she deserves for their company to tank and the smart employees will follow the first one who leaves.
It's "evil" in the sense that you are deliberately and dishonestly screwing employees in the worst possible way. It's exploitation.
The very reason this is illegal is because it's quite obviously morally and ethically wrong, but people are motivated to do it anyway.
The only difference is that on a small scale, you might not be caught, or you might be able to bluster your way out of the consequences.
But you can't really hold it against companies that are poaching. Whether or not they are friends with you because everyone in tech basically knows each other (through networks).
There seems to be a limited talent pool in specific skill sets for certain geographies. In this case, the market is in the favor of the employee, not necessarily the employer.
Remember, the law is often here to try to destroy "from now on" customs that are deemed toxic.
Maybe they should just rename anti-trust law into anti-friend law, the bitter killjoys.
Is that even legal? IANAL but it seems highly unlikely that only hiring someone if they agree to a reference check with someone they didn't list as a reference is kosher in most states. Typically the way this would work is that you could make a conditional offer, and anything beyond date of hire and date of departure (that caused them to not get the job) would be grounds to sue their previous employer... in which case you really aren't doing your friend any favors.
IMO in the scenario described you should just hire them and apologize to your friend.
Edit: and even if it is legal in your state its unethical as hell. If your friend says not to hire they are most likely going to be looking to replace them ASAP with someone who isn't looking to leave.
Be careful not to conflate social custom (it is customary that a company not reference check you with the company you work at) with law.
EDIT (reply to below): which has nothing to do with law. Parent claimed it was illegal, however. Not to mention the fact that it is perfectly ethical to make an offer conditional on letting you talk to their employer. What would be unethical is if you talked to their employer without asking them.
That aside, in the scenario "Fred" is good friends with one of your top engineers in the scenario presented. If you ask "Cathy" and she says yes everything is golden, if she says no and Fred gets canned or Cathy's company goes under one of your top employee's good friends is now unemployed because you put your personal relationships ahead of the buisness. This is not a good situation to be in.
Also from the article: "It is important to note that just about all of these kinds of policies violate the Right to Work laws in California"
Her friend isn’t much of a friend if he lets a purely professional decision interfere with their non-professional relationship.
Seems like colluding to me. Just like in the Google/Apple/Adobe case. It doesn't matter if it's done out of friendship or fear of upsetting almighty Steve Jobs.
http://www.eliastorres.com/blog/how-to-fight-illegal-recruit...
Plus, friendships can often lead to far greater payoffs in the long-term -- I've given and received many introductions to stellar employees among my circle of friends; having a reputation as a robber is the fastest way to stop this flow of introductions.
OT: Ben has a lot of really great material on his blog, and I'd highly recommend anyone who hasn't yet to read through everything! He also has a great book that compiles all his wisdom into one place [1]; if you're too busy to read it I've shared my notes on Evernote [2].
[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Hard-Thing-About-Things/dp/0062273...
[2] https://www.evernote.com/shard/s345/sh/7b35d8ab-daba-4181-8b...
The "thing" there is not the employee, but the opportunity.
While my hearth fights the need of shouting "stop behaving like a whiny bitch about the company relationships", then you realize that companies in US are equal to peoples.
And that, as John Stewart was pointing out recently, maybe sometimes they also pretends to have religious rights.
So I am not surprised that something like hires get taken as betrayals.
However, if logic had to enter this equation somehow, we should realize the purpose of a business is business. So, if an employee is an asset you should treat him as such, and let him go.
And if you or your friend CEO get emotionally attached to an employee, you have larger issues. One, maybe, is a narcissistic disorder.
On the other hand, Ben does point out that in practice you really shouldn't do this with very many companies, if any. And I'm not sure you could say that it's CEOs' (or any employees') duty to prevent personal considerations from affecting their work.
This seems counterproductive. Executives should recuse themselves when emotionally compromised. A bona fide independent decision should calm a rational friend.
Business relationships are more complicated. An employee of your largest customer, for example. Good protocol works most of the time. Commercial reason and the law fill the gaps.
I understand that this particular case of Google-Apple happens to be considered illegal. However, I am not convinced that a law banning this practice will not make things worse for most people.
A cartel involves an arrangement where members REFUSE TO OFFER a better deal than the others - a pricefixing arrangement. On the other hand, this is very clearly about not going blatantly on each other's turf to solicit / poach. Consider this ... how did Apple find out about this? Was the employee called during work hours?
How come recruiters - internal HR or external agencies - can be instructed to not advertise job openings in venues like porn sites, but - it seems from all this outrage - cannot be instructed to not advertise on their competitors' websites? Why can't companies decide that the cost of reprisals for poaching key members is too high, independently and internally, before agreeing not to do it? To sum up - I do not see this as a cartel AS LONG AS neither company turns away candidates who applied on their own, based on a mutual agreement. To be fair, Google did have such a policy and to the extent that this policy existed, that WAS a cartel. But NOT if the agreement is limited to not advertising offers to each other's key employees. Those employees can easily find out job openings and average salaries just like everyone else can.
If you are going to make the argument that recruiters calling certain key employees of the other company to lure them away will give the majority of employees a better sense of how much they are worth and everyone's salary if going to go up, you'll have to work pretty hard to show the connection. Poaching key members of a team (e.g. to sabotage a competitor's project) seems to mostly benefit those key members. It increases the cost for everyone else including the companies involved. And that cost is very likely to be passed on to the other employees. You would also have to show that the companies will always choose not to pass on the cost of poaching to their employees -- because otherwise, you will have to admit that LESS poaching might actually lead to LARGER salaries. And in fact, the data seems to show this. (Once again, by poaching I mean reaching out and specifically cold calling key people in rival companies to advertise positions that they could have found on their own.)
To the contrary, the article is clearly about the case where someone from another company's "turf" approaches you unsolicited:
> You check with your people to make sure that they did not approach Fred first and they assure you that Fred was already looking and will go to another company if not yours. Now what?
I think this is clearly about CEOs treating employees as the company's property in a psychological sense, rather than thinking about them as beings with agency.
Is that the only law they violate?
What I like about the new Silicon Valley elite is that those asshats are too socially gauche to realize that their attitudes are considered completely unacceptable by, well, everyone else. It's really fun to watch them humiliate themselves in Valleywag.
My 2 cents is this isn't that black and white, but it's very delicate. The only way it works is if the employee in question approaches their current boss first, saying, "Here is why I think it's time to move one. I would like to approach company Y. Can I have your blessing?" This gives their boss a chance to either fix the situation, or encourage the move. You can give a wink and nod that the interview would go well (you would never do this without confidence based on work experience that you'd hire them) but you can't formally start the process before this happens.
Now expecting your friend who owns the company to still be friends afterwards is a completely different question.
How would you feel if someone refused to hire you as a favor to your old boss's boss?
