When did stealing employees from your competitors—a longstanding and honorable tradition about as old as business itself—become a bad thing?

I used to work in the newspaper business way back when a) the newspaper business was still healthy; and, b) there were still cities in this country that actually had honest-to-God competition between daily newspapers. I know that makes me a dinosaur, but I can remember a time when the best part of my job was figuring out how to poach some up-and-coming star away from the other paper in town.

That’s why I am surprised at what’s going on in California’s Silicon Valley, where “the U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether Google, Yahoo, Apple, Genentech and other tech companies conspired to keep others from stealing their top talent,” according to a story in the San Jose Mercury News.

According to the newspaper, “few details have been disclosed so far about the hiring-practice probe, which The Washington Post first reported in a story on its Web site late Tuesday. Citing two unnamed sources, [the Post] said the Justice Department was examining the possibility that the four companies and other unnamed firms may have violated antitrust laws by ‘negotiating the recruiting and hiring of one another’s employees.’ ”

My surprise at this story flows out of my experience working at a San Francisco dot-com during the boom years from 1998 to 2001. Back then, poaching talent from a competitor (and we viewed just about ALL companies battling for technology workers as such) was a mark of both a strong company brand as well as a crackerjack recruiting operation. Luring talent away from someone else was as common as fighting traffic on the Bay Bridge—and, a helluva lot more fun.

So, having some sort of agreement among tech firms to not recruit talent away from one another, if true, would be a huge change in how Silicon Valley tech companies traditionally operate. Plus, it flies in the face of California’s “tough rules barring companies from restricting their employees’ job hunting,” the Mercury News noted.

“Many companies across the country require employees to sign so-called noncompete agreements, in which the worker agrees not to be hired by a competitor within a certain period of time,” the newspaper said. “But California law generally regards such pacts as unenforceable, said Bob Taylor, a Palo Alto attorney who specializes in antitrust law. … As a result, Taylor said, California ‘is one of, if not the most, difficult states for employers to prevent employees from taking jobs with competitors.’ ”

Maybe I just see things differently out here on the Left Coast, but a deal among big tech companies to pull their punches and not recruit talent from one another is akin to thieves agreeing not to steal from each other. What’s the point? And, can you really trust anyone to hold up their end of such an unholy agreement?

I follow the philosophy that all’s fair in business, love and war. Isn’t this what the whole notion of “passive” recruiting—an oxymoron if there ever was one—is all about? I’d love to hear what recruiters have to say about this, because if deals like this to not hire from competitors make sense, we might as well kiss the whole notion of recruiting goodbye.

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