When Start-ups Get AcquiHIRED

You might find yourself living in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife and you may ask yourself…Did I just get Acquihired? Yeah. Welcome to where the players play! Zoom in Google Earth style right smack dab in Silcone Valley. Swish over here. Swish you’re over there. Boom. There is a dude walking with a latte. Across the street some android developers discuss if Oracle really owns the rights to frickin open source Java code. Not! But if you sniff the air, you can smell those crisp dolla-dolla bills in the wind. Start-ups raise money, spend it, raise more, spend it again, ask for more, give up ownership, buy some arcade games and a keggerator AND WHAM! They sale the company. Actually they don’t really really sale the company…they um…get Acquihired.

What is acquihiring you ask? It’s a way to acquire all the employees from a company. Basically a company recruits all the employees without really taking any of the products or services. This was a crazy trend about 4 years ago and it’s going to be NEW in 2016 and all the rage. Why?

WHY????

Easy.

If you’re a large company with a team of recruiters, you can spend MILLIONS and TIME trying to hire top talent. And it will take a long time. Plus, SPEED TO MARKET IS CRITICAL. Just ask Google. And...look at Microsoft. Speed matters.

Getting an entire team (talent) through company doors quickly and intact is better than owning the product (sometimes).

The acquihiring mania will be in full force 2016 like never before. Companies with deep pockets won’t let the talent disappear into thin air without a fight.

All those cool companies churning out apps...they will be acquiHIRED. Watch and see.

AND...

If you’re working for a start-up…you may just ask yourself….”How did I get here”?

(via Glennlist)

Comment by Katrina Kibben on August 4, 2015 at 10:07am: I've seen this strategy and it definitely works for the big guys.. but what about the little guys? How can they make the most of these acquisitions? Inevitably some of these people quit instead of moving to the new company, right?

Comment by Michael Glenn on August 4, 2015 at 10:21am: Yes little guys too. A lot of people stick around too. There is sort of wait and see mentality for these employees because they have invested in the technology and they all know each other. Plus, new start-ups will be in on the action. Why ask for a lot of VC dough to go get developers, managers, and so forth when they can simply just take an entire team from another start-up. I think this will be easy peasy for a lot HR tech start-ups too - especially if they have similar products and ideas.