Are companies conspiring to keep recruiters from doing their thing?

There were two great articles this week that talked about how both Steve Jobs (Apple) and Eric Schmidt (Google) strategized to keep recruiters from waging in a talent war.

In early 2005, Jobs emailed Google founder Sergey Brin, threatening him to stay away from recruiting Apple's Safari web browser team:

if you [Brin] hire a single one of these people that means war.

Then in 2007, when Jobs learned that a Google recruiter had contacted an Apple employee, he forwarded the email to Schmidt with this message:

I would be very pleased if your recruiting department would stop doing this.

The recruiter was fired an hour later, Pando reports.

This 'agreement' not only kept both companies from poaching one another's talent, but also impacted the wages for tech engineers.

Business Insider: Emails Show Apple's Steve Jobs And Google's Eric Schmidt Allegedly ...

Pando Daily: How Silicon Valley’s most celebrated CEOs conspired to drive down 1...

Have any recruiters out there been instructed to stay away from recruiting folks from a particular organization/company? Have any IT recruiters been impacted by these type of 'agreements'? Or in general did you ever have a 'do not call' list? And if so why?

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Permalink Reply by Linda Ferrante on January 30, 2014 at 10:07am

Of course! There are 'gentleman's agreements' all over the place in the recruiting world! Maybe not for the extreme reasons of Google and Apple, but they are definitely out there!

We won't pull from a company we work with. There are some companies (BIG companies, I might add) who don't have a great reputation, so there is some push back to hire the people from those companies. Mostly, it's either because of the negative reputation, or a gentleman's agreement.