This post should be labeled “for owners and managers only” but I’m all about full-disclosure so if you’re interested read on.
A question was posed to me by an owner/manager about the proprietary nature of candidate data. It used to be, before the days of LinkedIn, Facebook, Plaxo and all the other myriad of social networks, recruiters entered all of their candidate data into a confidential company-owned database. If the recruiter left the firm, the data stayed behind. Today, recruiters are paid to develop networks and source candidates that could walk out the door with them when they leave the firm visa vis these social networks. This manager wanted to know my thoughts about trying to manage the risk of this happening.
This was my response:
In a world that’s becoming increasingly open source and where social networking is connecting strangers and calling them “friends”, “owning” connections is an antiquated notion. I used to lose sleep about who else had access to my connections and what would happen if the recruiters I was paying to build their network left me and took all their “friends” with them. Then, I realized that sleep deprivation accelerates aging and promotes weight gain so I decided that nothing would interfere with the quality of my sleep.
Seriously, “owning” people in a database makes as much sense to me as an employer accusing me of trying to “steal” one of their employees. We don’t own people and you can’t buy relationships. It’s all about adding value. If I have a better relationship and bring more value to an individual who is linked to 100,000 other recruiters he will work with me. If I bring enough value to the recruiter who works for me and she believes she’s better off working for me than someone else, I don’t have to worry about her taking her social network and her billings out the door. Non-competes could be a solution, but I’ve never used one. Frankly, a recruiter who isn’t clever enough to figure out how to get around one isn’t someone I want to lock down and I can’t reconcile the hypocrisy of spending my days helping candidates figure out how to break their non-competes while I try to enforce them with my recruiters.
On a very practical side-note, I make sure I’m in my recruiters’ social networks so I have access to their contacts. Of course, by doing so I also give them access to mine. That’s the way the world works today. The only other option is to isolate yourself and your recruiters but the downside to that is obvious. Better to run the risk of paying a recruiter to build relationship and have them leave than not build relationships and have them stay.
