Monday, August 14, 2006

Talent Poaching

Today’s TOI reports that
“Wipro Biomed, the life sciences division of Wipro Ltd, has won an order from the Delhi High Court restraining the company's long term partner Beckman Coulter from luring its employees, albeit temporarily. Beckman Coulter is understood to be preparing ground to enter India on its own. The ruling has put the spotlight back on the poaching phenomenon that is threatening to snowball into a major controversy affecting the Indian industry across sectors like life sciences, aviation and BPO.
Talent Poaching or Talent acquisition? How do you define it? Most of the developed nations have already witnessed this trend and have come up with confidentiality clauses to prevent people from joining competitors.

Does poaching actually help organizations fill roles? Here's one viewpoint.

The war for talent has intensified and organizations are using every rule in the book to retain the competitive advantage of skilled workforce. However do you feel that it’s fair to have clauses in terms of agreement in order to restrain employees from making career moves?

After all when the high demand for a particular talent/skill may remains only for a specific period of time, so why not let them make hay when Sun shines.

I’m sure HR folks will disagree. But in a perfectly competitive market labor is mobile and most of the organizations today believe in buying skills rather than developing skills.

Large and established organizations typically have large training facilities and spend on developing quality manpower. However some prefers to adopt the buy strategy and are willing to pay extra for folks with some experience and training. This situation presents a unique challenge to HR in all organizations.

Typically any country which grows at a fast pace but fails to develop adequate infrastructure to develop skilled manpower faces such talent crunch. Indian software talent is one such example in case. This war is likely to get worse in the days to come as global supremacy will depend on the talent pool of the country.

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