BusinessWeek.com offers up the Best Corporate Practices 2008 which is a fascinating slide show if you have time to view it. This is from the opening of the article:
In fact, much of the gap between the best and worst management practices can be described by that word: trust. At one point as a corporate human resources leader during the dot-com boom, our company switchboard was bombarded with calls from recruiters, seeking to pull away our sharpest technical talent. Our hardworking phone operators did their best to deter search consultants looking to make contact with talent by any means possible, but it wasn’t always easy.
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We said to our phone operators, “Let the calls through.” We said to our technical folks, “Talk to these guys. Write down everything they say. Learn as much as you can about the jobs they’re recruiting for, the projects our competitors are working on, and the salaries they’re paying. Fill out this form every time you pick a recruiter’s brain, hand us the form, and we’ll pay you $50.” Presto—some of our folks made a bunch of money in a short time, we learned boatloads about the hiring activity around town, and most important, we enrolled our employees in helping the company meet its goals.
Clever. You know, recruiting is often a cat-and-mouse endeavor that involves multiple moves on multiple levels. My father likes to say that some people play checkers and others play chess. This company’s defensive approach was a smart tactic during the tech boom of the late ’90s.