Some of your company’s competitors are not selling similar products to you, or selling to a similar market to you, but are hiring similar people with similar skills.<\/p>\n
A few years ago, one of my company’s key recruitment competitors folded. I had a friend who lost his job there, and we were hiring, so I suggested that he submit a resume. He declined; he wanted to move to a different city to be closer to his family. However, he offered me a organisational chart and phone list of the now defunct company.<\/p>\n
That would be a very valuable document for our recruitment efforts. We could target people who we knew had the skills we needed and were recently out of a job – probably very keen to get a new job soon, before the next mortgage payment.<\/p>\n
Such materials would normally be closely guarded, at least in part to prevent competitors poaching your key staff. My friend would be violating corporate policy to give us this list.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, the corporation was now defunct; no one was employed by them. They wouldn’t object to their ex-employees being hired. In a way, we were doing everyone a service.<\/p>\n
I ummed-and-ahhed for a while. I eventually approached the director of my department, and explained I had an ethical dilemma; I asked for his advice. We debated in back-and-forth, before deciding that, although the documents would be a great benefit to us, we would be effectively asking this guy to do something unethical. Even if he was freely volunteering to provide that information, we didn’t feel comfortable about it. In addition, there was the privacy of the people on the list that should be respected. We decided to decline the offer.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Fast forward to 2007. Another friend has suffered from mass layoffs at his company. However, this time there is a Facebook group for all the ex-employees to join and offer each other support…<\/p>\n
…a public Facebook group that anyone can read! No-one is breaking corporate policy and they have publicly identified themselves as job-seekers, so the privacy issue seems less relevant.<\/p>\n
I wish we were hiring at the moment, because I think the rules just changed!<\/p>\n
A friend has suffered from mass layoffs at his company. However, it is 2007, and there is a Facebook group for all the ex-employees to join and offer each other support…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23,21],"tags":[63,49,62],"class_list":["post-423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-based-on-a-true-story","category-observation","tag-corporate-life","tag-ethics","tag-social-networking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}