We recently announced we had hired somebody to come join us, via a recruitment agency we had retained.
We were originally going to give a shout out to that agency, but they asked to remain anonymous and gave the following 2 comments.
The business I recruited out of aren’t a client of mine at the moment, but if they ever knew it was my agency that recruited that employee out of their business, they might be funny about me making money recruiting their replacement.
And it goes without saying I would never approach any of your staff at EA First.
I have spent a good portion of my life trawling through preferred supplier contracts, to be allowed to partner with various firms.
I always found the clause that was along the lines of “you will not recruit anybody out of our business whilst you work with us” very draconian and defensive.
Even if it wasn’t in there, a majority of clients would have an issue working with an agency that has just recruited their employee out of their team.
People may think it is “commercially sensible” or “morally correct” to have that clause, but the reality is it creates an environment where you limit the true knowledge of your employee engagement.
At EA First, I have today shared the contact details of the recruitment agency we use with my entire team, and will do so with all subsequent hires.
We do not want one of the best recruiters locally not approaching our team, if they genuinely feel they have something better for them.
For us, before we recognise our staff as an employee, we first recognise them as a person with their life, family and happiness in mind.
To sit on the SMT of a business is not a birth right, but a humbling position of trust that the employees of a company bestow upon you.
In our eyes we will lose employees for 2 reasons. These are:
We lost sight of our employee engagement, we lost sight of our responsibility to our employee, and finally, we lost sight of the warning signals, and as such they have rightfully left us and we as a business have a hard lesson to learn!
The employee reaches a bottle neck, or a position of boredom, and there isn’t actually anything we can offer them to give them what they seek.
If we have fallen short in our offering, or we cannot give them the next thing, I do not want our employees to lose the potential opportunity of something better, because the best recruiter who we partner with will not approach our staff.
We want our recruitment partner to know they can freely approach our staff, without fear of consequences, because we will be working incredibly hard to ensure we never lose sight of our employee engagement, and we ensure we provide a place we hope no other firm will be able to offer!
If we use a defensive clause to prevent free market forces taking place, how will we ever fully learn every issue we may have in our business?
It creates a world of complacency and reduced productivity, because we don't lose staff who don't have their hearts in their roles, which in turn means we never learn from our failing as a business, because then our staff also become complacent.
If a recruiter is able to approach staff, and you lose staff, then the SMT will quickly work out what they need to fix!
We work with the best recruiter in our region, if they recruit somebody out of our business, that is our failing and not a black mark on them. We will not make another mistake, by cutting ourselves off at the knees, by refusing to use the best recruiter, because they are making money on taking our employee out, as well as recruiting somebody back into our firm.
We will use them, and learn from where we failed to ensure we keep the rest of our staff.
There is a debate here around Idealism vs Reality vs Commerciality.
For us at EA First, we are choosing an ideal we believe is the right path.
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