How To Stop Your Competitors From Poaching Your Talent? (Guest Blog)

Your competitor is always on a lookout for any opportunity to undermine your organization. One of the most common methods is to poach employees who are working in your organization. They particularly hunt the star employees of your organization which obviously hurt your organization financially and affect your morale. Here we’ve rounded up tips that will keep your competitors from hunting the talent working in your organization:

1. Sign An Agreement

There is such a thing as an ‘Anti-Poaching Agreement’. This is a sort of contract signed and maintained between corporations. It’s an effective means of nipping the poaching danger in the bud.
An Anti-Poaching agreement makes new recruits and star employees safe from the clutches of your competitors. As an HR profession, this writer has seen too many employees lured away by promises of better things on the other side.

Having an actual legal document can ensure some measure of safety from poaching. However, if a third-party recruiter or headhunter tries to poach your shining stars, there’s little a company can do except create a resistant environment.

2. Increase The Notice Policy

New recruits are usually on a probation period. While this means that they won’t get full benefits yet and face unannounced termination, it also means they can leave any time they want. Since they also have less attachment to the company, new recruits are also the ones most likely to jump ship.

To prevent the poaching of new recruits, therefore, a company should have a long standard period for giving notice. This may mean that they have to do away with or shorten the probation period but can ensure that new recruits stay with the company for quite some time.

One would have to weigh the pros and cons of such a decision since some candidates would hesitate to sign a contract with a very long notice policy. However, if the benefits are good enough, there’s no reason why a recruit wouldn’t want to stay on and be assimilated into the company.

3. Introduction Of Bonus Schemes

One of the benefits you can offer for retaining your chosen recruits is to inform them of a bonus scheme. For example, they may get a bonus at the end of every month, but only actually receive the cash at the end of the year. Hence, if a new recruit is thinking of switching jobs, they would be less likely to do so during the year.
Since companies suffer the most when recruits leave mid-year, this scheme is especially beneficial to the employing party. The bonus scheme would also ensure that new recruits are happy and satisfied in the place of work. This thereby lessens their chances of walking away at the sight of a better opportunity.

4. Being Alert In Crucial Times

Employees are more sensitive to your competitor’s poaching strategies when the company is going through a crucial time. This could mean layoffs, relocation restructuring processes, strategy or policy changes, or even when rumors get out of hand. Such occurrences cause employees to become insure and unsure of their job as well as their convenience.

Therefore, it is the HR department’s responsibility to assure the employees that they are wanted and needed within the organization. There should also be a monitoring method in place to find out which employee is the most susceptible to poaching.

Wrapping Up…
After so much is put into finding the ideal candidate, and then employing them, a competitor stealing away the fruits of your efforts is just unbearable. One can’t deny that this sneaky strategy is actually quite brilliant; they don’t have to put in the same resources, yet they get away with the final reward. At the same time, it is your business that suffers.

Proper communication with our employees, awareness of their needs, and certain well-placed policies are hence invaluable. These can effectively prevent a competitor poaching your talent and gaining and edge in that area.

Author Bio:

Priscilla Ellie is a Business Consultant, Head of HR, and a Blogging Geek. She is a senior member of the research faculty of assignment corp uk. In her blog, she shares insights into the various aspects of business management, leadership management, and HR trends. She is a patron of poetry and literature and loves reading works of William Shakespeare.