How to get internal employee poaching right

Knowing where your company sits on this spectrum is vital to understanding how to go about pursuing a transfer. And if you can help lay the groundwork toward a more transfer-friendly culture in advance, the long-run benefits can be considerable.

Trusting relationships matter

Even if your company has an open culture, it’s critical to develop cooperative relationships with managers in other departments because losing a top performer isn’t easy for anyone. Nevertheless, if a user department manager recognizes an employee’s interest in transfering to IT, and you have a strong working relationship with that manager, internal hiring can go a lot more smoothly.

For example, the two of you could arrange a period of weeks or months for the employee to fully transition from the user department to IT. During this time, the employee might perform work for both departments. This approach would give the employee time to get up to speed in IT while affording the user department manager time to train or recruit someone else to fill the departing employee’s role.

Never forget protocol

At some companies, poaching an employee from another departments is considered unethical and underhanded. Regardless, internal employee poachingcan certainly be an issue if you actively recruit another department’s employee without letting the other department manager know.

It is vital to know up front the actions and behaviors that are acceptable within your company before you start recruiting another department’s employee. For instance, in some cases, it is acceptable for an employee to be “loaned out” from one department to another for the duration of a specific one-off project. Such a policy helps provide temporary resources for projects while enabling employees on loan to gain knowledge and cross-train in another discipline. Still, the intent is always to return the employee to their original department once the project is complete. 

In other cases, employee transfers are intended to become permanent, but there generally is a period of time during which the employee still maintains some of the duties of their original department. This gives the user department manager time to recruit or train another employee to assume the departing employee’s responsibilities, as mentioned above.