From...

by Mary Brandel

(IDG) -- Brian Farrar always knows when he's being raided. It's the way the phones ring from one cubicle to the next. When employees pick up the phone, their usual tone of voice subtly changes.

It's an old trick of the recruiter trade: Establish one IT worker's phone extension and then change the numbers sequentially to get neighboring peers: 801, 802, 803, for example.

Not exactly rocket science. But Farrar, who's president of IT consulting firm Metamor Technologies Inc. in Chicago, has decided not to jumble up his company's phone extensions. The way Farrar sees it, recruiters will find their way in, someday, somewhere, somehow.

Instead, the company employs, as its best offense, a good defense.

"You're better off making the work environment so attractive that people who get trimmed are the ones who were going to get trimmed anyway," Farrar says.

So, in addition to offering competitive compensation, Metamor tries to offer a fun and casual work environment. "We have pinball machines, pool tables and even a 'payroll goddess,' who brings around the checks in costume," Farrar says.

With the information technology skills shortage at a record high, retention has become Job 1 for IT managers. And nearly everyone agrees that happy employees are the best defense against aggressive recruiters.

"It's very difficult to defend yourself from people being contacted," says David Dell, research director at The Concours Group, a consulting firm in Kingwood, Texas. "Once recruiters find one person who leaves, they've got word-of-mouth access to other people inside that company. It's much better to make sure the organization is the type of place people don't want to leave."

But what about lining up a good offense, too? In case you haven't noticed, IT recruiting has taken on the fervor of extreme sports. Particularly with the Internet, recruiters are finding unforeseen — and sometimes ethically questionable — ways to infiltrate corporate ranks.

"The gloves are off," says Chris Velissaris, a technical recruiting consultant at VIE Inc. in Chicago. "Recruiters are saying, 'I need people, and by any means necessary that's legal, I'm going to find them.'"

So, how can you make the recruiters' job just a little bit more difficult? "There are all kinds of ways employers can smarten up," says Fran Quittel, a San Francisco expert in high-tech careers and recruitment (and Computerworld's Career Adviser columnist).

For starters, she says, "Don't put all your employees' names on any Web site, and don't have a phone system you can tap in to at night to get a complete directory listing."

To recruiters, voice mail can be either a gold mine or their worst enemy. "If you don't have a specific name, you often can't get through," says Lina Fafard, a branch manager at Montgomery West, an executive search firm in Torrance, Calif. "Then, if you call the receptionist and ask for the director of the DB2 group, they'll say you need the name or we can't put you through."

Of course, there are ways around that, such as good old technical support. "They're usually pretty free about giving out information," Fafard says.

On the other hand, voice-mail systems can yield lots of valuable information. "[Recruiters] can call after-hours and listen to voice mail, which gives the person's name," Farrar says. "Then, during regular business hours they call back and say, 'Hi, John Smith, we've heard a lot about you.' That's a cool thing if you're 23 years old."

On the Internet

But the new weapon of choice is the Internet. In fact, the best way to make your employees harder to find is to learn about the latest Internet recruiting techniques.

"I would focus on how employees are making themselves visible on the Net and how you can limit that," says Tracey Claybrooke, president of Claybrooke & Associates Inc., an Internet recruitment consulting firm in Tampa, Fla. Claybrooke also advises corporations on how to protect their Web sites from recruiters.

One suggestion is to attend a recruitment sourcing seminar, such as those held by Intelligent Search Technology Ltd. "I wouldn't send a recruiter, I'd send a security person," Quittel says.

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At those seminars, you'll learn about Web flipping, newsgroup mining and sophisticated search techniques.

With Web flipping, recruiters use a search engine like AltaVista to find all the links associated with an employer's Web site.

"You say, 'Give me all the Web sites that are linked to Oracle.com.' Hopefully what you'll find are user groups, fan clubs of Oracle, private Web pages of people who work with Oracle, lists of all their friends who are Oracle programmers and home pages for all of them," says Carl Kutsmode, president of Tiburon Group, a recruitment firm in Chicago. "You might even get into a hidden Web page that has the entire employee directory because the programmer didn't bother to program that to be part of the overall security."

To foil Web flippers, companies should ask employees with personal Web pages not to link back to the corporate site, Claybrooke says. "It should be company policy, with someone responsible for checking whether people are linked."

Similarly, recruiters are taught how to mine newsgroups to find specific names of employees at target companies. They just log in to a newsgroup and do a company domain search, which pulls together a quick list of every contributor from the target company.

To avoid exposure, ask your employees who participate in newsgroups to use Web-based e-mail so recruiters can't identify which company they work for, Claybrooke suggests.

That tactic will only go so far, however. Recruiters like Kutsmode hang out in newsgroups merely to network. "We'll look at people who are frequently responding and send them an e-mail saying, 'We monitor this newsgroup, and you seem to be an expert. Perhaps you could suggest other newsgroups to talk to people like yourself. And by the way, here's an opportunity, if you'd like to pass it along to friend.'"

Kutsmode does the same with authors of articles and white papers published on the Web.

"We search for articles written by people with specific titles," he says. "We've been very successful developing ongoing referral relationships that way."

Low-tech methods

Of course, not all recruiting techniques are so high-tech. For example, did you know there's a black market for company phone directories? Fafard says street prices range from $50 to $100 a pop. You could keep a tighter rein on those directories, but a good severance policy might do the trick.

"I've had directories mailed to me anonymously because the employee was mad at the company for not giving them something or maybe they got laid off," Fafard says.

And there are some very simple measures you can take. For example, Metamor doesn't post its organizational chart online, because it would quickly reveal which employees have which skills. The company also doesn't post employee names on its Web sites, just sales representatives.

"Just put a 'Contact us' with one name," Claybrooke says. And if your site publishes white papers written by employees, don't put the specific author's name on it, she adds.

Another suggestion is to be courteous when recruiters make their sales calls. "If you hang up on a recruiter, forget it," Fafard says. "These days, you're either a client or a recruit-from."

Certainly there are recruitment tactics you can't do anything about. "It's like trying to stop the ocean," Quittel says. "For instance, I stand next to you at a conference, and you have a badge on, and I look you up in Big Yellow. Some of it is totally serendipitous."

Sleeping with the enemy?

And you don't always know who the enemy is. "What I find offensive is the recruiter who wants to do business with us, and then they start stealing our employees," says Diane Thom, human resources manager for the department of information services at Comerica Inc. in Auburn Hills, Mich. "They're feeding us with candidates while they're wooing our employees away."

Just the same, Thom is a true noninterventionist. For example, Comerica keeps its phone list online. "We have it [on Lotus Notes] and want it to be that way," she says. "I don't think you can ever make your people invisible. We concentrate on making it so comfortable for them to be here that they may listen and hear what's going on, but we're coming out in the long run."

Because certainly, offensive strategies can backfire. Take the policy of not giving out employee names over the phone. "I was called by a sales rep, and he garbled his last name," Kutsmode says. "When I called back and asked to speak with 'Steve,' the receptionist wouldn't connect me. Here he was, trying to sell me something — I wasn't even calling to recruit him."

Similarly, some companies create nonintuitive e-mail addresses so their employees are more difficult to reach. "But we don't think it's worth making people's e-mail addresses look silly," Farrar says. You also risk sending employees the wrong message.

"If you do things that say to the employee, 'they're trying to keep me off the market,' they're more likely to go see what they're worth," he adds.

The consensus among employers is that if recruiters work hard enough, they'll find your employees, perhaps your best ones.

But by creating a great defense and by taking a few offensive measures, you can at least feel satisfied you haven't given them the keys to the castle.

"It's really important to take care of your employees and make sure that if you put them in a room full of recruiters, they'd say, 'I love my job,'" Fafard says. "If not, you deserve to be raided."