Many a time I have seen people hiring the competitors executives to get immediate results. If the competitor ,from whom candidate is taken away,does not act immediately and fills the gap with proper candidate the market share is taken away by the competitor.

If a company take proper steps to build the brand and build on these advantages difinitely there will be an advantage.

if he brings business :: contacts :: experience :: expertise ::

milk him , give him % age but don't tell him your companies secrets because  AAdat :::

keep him at the periphery without letting him feel so :::

because ::: loyalty matters everywhere ::: whether business , army , intel companies or even mafia:::

I would surely agree it works. If my company picks a good performing sales person from the competition, its a double advantage.

a) Certain clients whom we may have not had a break through or entry can be captured. Business moves faster.

b) In the mean time the competition would suffer in their performance as their best / good sales person is out. 

As a sales person I am happy . The company may or may not face teething problems becausing of hiring from competition. But the competitor will have to start building the process all afresh.

It works, particularly if the competition is clobbering you! :)

Its not an easy decision because it directly tells your sales team that they are no good and then there is a discontentment that seeps in. Competitors sales team to be implanted in yours could be a decision that would actually pertain to. "What Position?"!

So there are a lot of issues that nedd to be ironed out before employing such a person. Then the obvious question arises of the current team performance. Well, the reason why competition is looked at means that the current crop are non performers. A hard look would tell you that the good ones need to be carefully filtered from the bad ones and the bad mangoes need to go before they spoil the others too. STEM THE ROT!

When a company asks for an experienced Salesperson from the air, the compititor is where we get them from............... so if you want somebody with industry experience you will get him/her from your either direct or indirect compititor...... Where you think a person gets the experience from?... as you dont trust own employees to be worth getting a raise or being promoted... Ha Ha....

if u are in the business of say selling soap or machinery, and hiring an experienced guy with field experience, you are obviously not going to make a hire from the BFSI or IT and rework your maths, stretch the imagination HR and work out a fitment.  The person is bound to be someone from another company selling soap or machinery, which means a competitor.

The other option is opting for a loan of a salesperson or arrangement from a subsidiary company.

I dont see any issue to be debated or argued in this matter as it is plain and very obvious COMMON SENSE.

I very much agree to the concept of hiring your competitors employee to survive the cut throat competition. Every person wants to climb up the stairs in his proffessional carreer and moreover its the organisations onus to retain its performing employees.

Yes it works out fine enough according to me, there should not be any problem according to me most of the sales professionals who come for interview would have worked with a competitor of yours...there will be many of them in sales profession who are like this so if we stop hiring them just because they were working for the competitor makes no sense and i have many of whom who are from the competitor orgainzation and they all are doing fine...so yes hiring them works for us in many ways.......

I agree with Darshil. Its totally depends on the company.  If you take care of your peolple well they would obviously stay...no two ways about that.  Ashish, in which world do you live in. I agree, what Manisha said was a little blunt but its true, we all know that...its what really happens in our world...So wake up and smell the coffee...

Sure from the face of it it seems all wrong but things in this world are not exactly as different as chalk and cheese.  Everything is in the grey region where there is a blend of both black and white.  For small organisations, training takes up the largest share of the revenue.  Having to train a fresher from the scratch is not a joke...it takes many man hours, resources and trained personnel for guidance, all this boils down to spending big bucks.  On the other hand hiring someone who is already familiar with the field saves a lot of time and eventually money.  There is no "lag" phase and the productivity starts almost instaneously...to top it all if this person were to leave after say 2-3 yrs, the company would have extracted the best from the salesperson and since no money was spend on training in the begining..its win win situation all the way for the company...