A provost asked me last week how to ethically poach academics from another university, and she said the phrase sounded like an oxymoron. She wasn't wrong to pause. When a university hires a professor away from another institution, it is taking something that another employer built and funded. The difference between a defensible hire and a damaged relationship is usually not whether the approach happened. It is how the approach was handled, what was disclosed, whether the candidate had room to decide, and what the previous institution could do to replace them.
This guide is for the people who run those searches: deans, department chairs, senior HR partners, and the administrative staff who coordinate offers. The goal is a lateral hire that leaves the previous institution able to recruit its own replacement without feeling ambushed.
The line between recruitment and raiding
Ethical poaching is lateral recruitment with a clear conscience. It starts when you reach out to someone who is not actively looking, and it obliges you to take extra care with their current commitments. Advertising a post and waiting for applications is not poaching; neither is hiring someone who approached you. Poaching begins when you move first.
Most of the ethics live in four practical choices: how you make the first contact, what you ask the candidate to reveal, how you treat their existing obligations, and how explicit you are about your own timeline. None of these is particularly mysterious. They are, however, easy to skip when a department is under pressure to fill a role before semester starts.
Start with the contract and the academic clock
Before you make the first call, find out how the person is employed. Some academics are on fixed-term contracts with a notice period written into national law or a collective agreement. Others hold continuing appointments where resignation is a matter of professional courtesy and institutional policy. Reading the public version of a collective agreement, or asking your own HR team to explain the likely constraints, is basic due diligence. A dean who knows the contract asks the right question in the first conversation instead of discovering a six-month notice period after the candidate has already said yes.
Timing is its own ethical instrument. A resignation that arrives in September may leave a department without someone to teach a required course. In many systems, a professor who leaves in January can still preserve the academic year for students if the process starts early enough. The most responsible searches work backwards from the candidate's teaching and supervision commitments instead of working forward from the hiring committee's convenience.
In practice, that means a department chair should ask one early question: what would a respectful departure date look like for the students and colleagues you are currently responsible for? The answer tells you whether the person thinks in institutional terms, and it tells the candidate that you do too.
The first conversation: discretion without games
Initial contact should go to a personal email address or a trusted intermediary, never through the current employer's switchboard or a shared departmental inbox. A search firm can help here if the university already uses one, because a third party can test interest without putting the candidate in the position of explaining a phone call from another dean's office.
Ask whether they are free to talk now. If they are not, accept it without pressing. Some of the worst approaches happen in conference hallways when a chair corners a junior lecturer who is standing next to their own head of department. That is not recruitment; it is ambush, and it creates a problem for both institutions before a single term has been discussed. One administrator I worked with kept a simple instruction on her desk: never ask a candidate to keep a secret from their current employer. That rule prevented more trouble than any contractual clause.
The American Association of University Professors set a durable baseline in its Statement on Recruitment and Resignation of Faculty Members, first adopted in 1961. The central idea is that negotiations should respect the faculty member's obligations to their current institution. In practice, that means you approach the person directly, keep the conversation private until they choose otherwise, and do not use them as a channel to extract confidential information about their department.
Written offers, notice periods, and counteroffers
An ethical poach includes a realistic decision window. A written offer that arrives on a Friday with a Monday deadline is not a negotiation; it is a pressure tactic dressed up as urgency. The same applies to offers made during a religious holiday, a medical leave, the final week of a grant submission, or the first week of a new term. If the candidate has a fixed-term contract, the notice period should be part of the offer conversation, not an afterthought. A written offer should state the salary band, teaching load, research support, start date, and whether relocation or visa costs are included. If any of those is still being negotiated, say so.
Counteroffers are normal. The honest chair tells the candidate before the offer that a retention package may arrive, and asks what would make a counteroffer genuinely relevant. That gives the person permission to consider staying without treating the current employer as a bargaining chip. It also protects your search from collapsing at the last minute when the current dean finally finds money for a retention salary increase.
The European Charter for Researchers pushes the same point from the candidate's side: recruitment should be transparent, and mobility should be recognised as a normal part of a research career. A hiring institution that hides salary bands or reopens terms after the candidate has resigned is behaving in a way the charter was written to discourage. For searches involving UK institutions, the Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers reinforces the expectation that recruitment should be open, fair, and free from avoidable delay.
After the signature, the real test begins
Moving a professor is rarely just about salary. A lab group may need equipment, a partner may need a job, children may need school places, and a visa may take months. The receiving university that treats the signed offer as the end of the process creates a gap where the candidate's old institution can re-engage with a counteroffer on Monday morning.
An administrative coordinator who owns the case by name makes a measurable difference: one person who confirms the start date, sends the contract annex for relocation, checks in before the candidate resigns, and answers within a day. As our earlier guide to employer branding in higher education explains, candidates read these details as a preview of the workplace they are joining.
Even a modest welcome matters. A dean who sends a short note to the incoming professor's lab manager, or a department administrator who arranges a pre-arrival campus tour, signals that the institution hired a person and not a productivity unit.
Where institutions get it wrong
Some failures are more common than others, and they share the same origin: nobody at the receiving institution owns the candidate's week-to-week experience.
- Using a doctoral student or postdoc to carry messages to their supervisor, which forces the junior person to keep secrets from their own adviser.
- Contacting a professor during a period when they are chairing a review of your department or sitting on a committee that will evaluate your grant.
- Making verbal promises about teaching load, lab space, or a partner's post that no dean has actually approved in writing.
- Asking a candidate to break a signed notice period because you need someone on campus sooner.
- Going quiet after the offer is accepted, leaving the candidate to explain a resignation while no one from the new institution is available to confirm the details.
The common thread is absence of a named person who owns the search. When no one is responsible for the week-to-week experience, the institution falls back on silence and the candidate fills the silence with doubt.
A practical step for this month
Pick one senior search you expect to run in the next year and write a one-page contact protocol. Name the person who makes the first approach. Specify which channel they use. State what can be promised verbally and what must be confirmed in writing. Set a minimum decision window, not just a maximum. Then have someone outside the hiring committee read the protocol and look for places where urgency might read as pressure.
This will not prevent every contested hire. It will, however, make the next one defensible when the other institution calls to ask what happened. That is the whole point of ethical poaching: not avoiding competition, but conducting competition in a way that leaves both institutions able to do their work the following week.
Photo by Hitesh Choudhary on Unsplash