Tipping Your Hand in
Hiring: Protecting Your Intellectual Property During the Hiring Process
It never ceases to amaze me how companies of all sizes, from
startups to multinational corporations, regularly tip their hand in
intellectual property during the hiring process. What is your hiring process telling your competition?
In a hypothetical setup, let’s say you are a software
engineering recruiter for the human resources (HR) team of a technology company
and you are asked to find some talent for a new business unit. You might talk with the hiring manager to
develop a job description and post the position to your company’s online career
center (and to any number of external job boards). The problem is that this is such a common
practice that companies rarely consider the intellectual property that they are
putting out there for today’s Big Data market to consume.
Okay, ditch the hypo, here’s an example directly from a
leading technology company’s job listings:
As you can see, the job title alone is already
revealing! From a technologist’s
perspective I can see from the job titles alone that this company is looking to
point their development efforts in the direction of Android, iOS, Hadoop, Git,
and MySQL. From a strategic management
perspective, it appears that (again from just the job titles alone) that they
are focused especially on building their international mobile presence and
payments framework. Clicking through any
number of these job postings only reveals more intimate details of the
programing languages, query languages, and technology development objectives
that the company is banking on. In a
technology industry where first-to-market can mean the difference between
innovator and laggard, trade secrets are unintentionally leaked through job
postings every day.
Protecting technology companies and the innovations they are
investing in is rapidly becoming a full time job for today’s technology
attorney. Intellectual property
practices in trade secrets can provide a number of avenues for protecting
innovations, but the shield can quickly crumble by sharing too much proprietary
information online. Such examples as
above also demonstrate the importance of in house intellectual property teams as
a line of review for new job postings.
What is your hiring process telling your competition?
#TINLA: THIS IS NOT
LEGAL ADVICE
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About the Author: Eric Everson is software
engineer with a law degree. Passionate
about matters of global intellectual property, prior to law school he earned an
MBA and a Masters of Science in Software Engineering. As the former Chief Technical Officer of
MyMobiSafe.com, he is a ten year veteran technology executive with extensive
industry experience in global intellectual property. As an academic, he is a
regular contributor, author, and consultant where technology and business
intersect with the law. The views and
opinions presented in this blog are his own and are not to be construed as legal
advice and are not intended as a legal advertisement. Follow: @iamtechlaw
Tags: Intellectual Property, Trade Secret, NDA, Software,
Software Engineering, Hiring, HR, Business, Startup, Corporate, IP, IP Law
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