ArticlesSome of your company’s competitors are not selling similar products to you, or selling to a similar market to you, but are hiring similar people with similar skills.
A few years ago, one of my company’s key recruitment competitors folded. I had a friend who lost his job there, and we were hiring, so I suggested that he submit a resume. He declined; he wanted to move to a different city to be closer to his family. However, he offered me a organisational chart and phone list of the now defunct company.
That would be a very valuable document for our recruitment efforts. We could target people who we knew had the skills we needed and were recently out of a job – probably very keen to get a new job soon, before the next mortgage payment.
Such materials would normally be closely guarded, at least in part to prevent competitors poaching your key staff. My friend would be violating corporate policy to give us this list.
On the other hand, the corporation was now defunct; no one was employed by them. They wouldn’t object to their ex-employees being hired. In a way, we were doing everyone a service.
I ummed-and-ahhed for a while. I eventually approached the director of my department, and explained I had an ethical dilemma; I asked for his advice. We debated in back-and-forth, before deciding that, although the documents would be a great benefit to us, we would be effectively asking this guy to do something unethical. Even if he was freely volunteering to provide that information, we didn’t feel comfortable about it. In addition, there was the privacy of the people on the list that should be respected. We decided to decline the offer.
Fast forward to 2007. Another friend has suffered from mass layoffs at his company. However, this time there is a Facebook group for all the ex-employees to join and offer each other support…
…a public Facebook group that anyone can read! No-one is breaking corporate policy and they have publicly identified themselves as job-seekers, so the privacy issue seems less relevant.
I wish we were hiring at the moment, because I think the rules just changed!
Comment by Aristotle Pagaltzis on September 1, 2007
Yeah, self-evidently. Whether or not they did so with appropriate awareness, the people in that Facebook group have already made a decision about their privacy as regards their employment with the company in question.
Privacy is the only reason I would have declined your friend’s offer anyway – I don’t see anything unethical about it per se. It is considered unethical when it unfairly tilts odds towards one company’s success over the other’s. What odds are there to tilt when one of them is already an ex-company?
And there is a very easy solution you could have found for the privacy issue: as an (ex-)employee, your friend was already entrusted with the list, and the people who worked there had had to consent to him (and many other coworkers) having their contact details. So he would not have been in breach of privacy for privately asking all his coworkers whether they would like to be contacted. You would then have received only the contact details of people who would have had consented to being approached – bingo.
Comment by Julian on September 2, 2007
I came to a similar easy solution – tell him to tell his friends to check out our jobs listing, and email us their resume if they were interested.
Maybe I am drawing a long bow, but he didn’t own the list to give away to me. The administrators of the company (or whoever controlled the assets of the company) may have been able to sell that list to a recruitment company, or similar – a company that would pay less if it had been already published and other people had picked out the best people.
Comment by Aristotle Pagaltzis on September 3, 2007
I don’t see any grounds on which you can assert private ownership over that list once the company is defunct. And if the administrators were to sell the list for their personal profit, what would entitle them to that profit more than your friend was entitled to helping you?
Maybe they would be if the profit from such a sale were shared with the entire company, but I doubt that’s what you were thinking about. Or that it would happen in practice.
Comment by Julian on September 3, 2007
I believe there are many ways that a company can wind up, but in each case there is ultimately an owner of the assets – whether it is a nice, clean divvying up of the plentiful assets amongst the shareholders or a nasty, appointed-administrators, lined-up-creditors company belly-up.
So, I’m not saying the administrators get to put the money in their own pockets. The administrators (if they exist) need to do what they can to squeeze all they can out of the remains of the company for the benefit of the creditors/shareholders.
I’m also not saying that the sale of the phone list would happen veryr often in practice. I am trying to illustrate that the list still has an owner, and the (ex-)employees don’t have the right to give it away without permission.
Comment by Aristotle Pagaltzis on September 3, 2007
OK, true.
It should be noted that the approach I suggested (as well as the less aggressive version you opted for) addresses that in the same way it addresses any privacy concerns.