You can’t make this stuff up. Now your company can recruit losers, and hire recruiters who can do it more easily.

Featured at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference: A pitch by a start-up calling itself PoachBase. The “company’s” tag-line: Poach talent from dying companies. The idea is to monitor other start-ups for death rattles and then go steal their employees.

Here’s the pitch:

Now here’s the question: Why would anyone want to recruit employees that are still hanging around a loser company?

My advice (free, no software required): It’s more fun to recruit people from good companies while they’re hanging around the local watering hole after work. (Well, beer might be software.)

Recruiting-industry watcher Joel Cheesman’s explains the problem clearly:

“The playbook for start-ups in the recruiting space usually goes something like this: Group of young, educated people — usually coming of [sic] their own job search, which apparently qualifies as experience in the employment space — come up with an idea to ‘make things better.'”

This is kind of reminiscent of the job applicant whose resume emphasizes, “I want to work with people in a good company.” Maybe they’re all the same bunch.

(If you want to watch the recruiting industry, sign up for Joel Cheesman’s free newsletter. I love it.)

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6 Comments
  1. Thanks for making my day, Nick.

  2. They must be really hard up for business and willing to try anything.

    I don’t think their tag line instills confidence though.

    On the flip side, the ecomony still hasn’t fully recovered and many companies are still hurting.

  3. When I went to see who I could poach, Poachbase didn’t even link to the dying companies.

    tsk, tsk, tsk

    Do the poachees know they are on the list?

  4. One thing PoachBase had going for it is very poor taste. They list a ‘dying company’ that is not, in fact, dying but did recently lose one of its founders to suicide. Really inappropriate.

    I also note that they are so far from ready for prime time that their URL is http://radiant-leaf-5808.heroku.com which is a temporary URL assigned by the PaaS provider.

    These people are not professionals, to put it mildly.

  5. @G: As I was watching the video, I noted the speaker dropped the f-bomb early — and it occurred to me this might be a goof… But as Joel Cheesman points out, this approach to starting a recruiting company is so real it’s classic.

  6. I find it really funny that the website lists companies with 0 employees with a high “poachability.”

    I guess they’re promising something from nothing….hmmm, I think that ringing phone is the 90s and they want their business model back.