HRpedia: 'Acquihire'
For sale: tech start-up, never used
Acquihire, n & v.
Traditional recruitment is a lot like Alien vs Predator – you’re either the hunter or the hunted. Fierce competition, tests of skill, a lot of dodgy H.R. Giger phallic imagery. Well, I’ve taken the analogy about as far as it goes.
The point is that it’s a little too much like hard work for some of the biggest fish, such as the Yahoos and the Googles of this world.
Unlike how normal companies might snipe a single talented employee from a rival, multi-billion dollar firms such as Facebook can afford to drag impoverished but talented small teams into their orbit and absorb them at their whim, reminiscent of a hedonistic Roman emperor plucking at grapes.
The slurred and drunken portmanteau of “acquire” and “hire” is reference to the process of acquiring small organisations not for their intrinsic value as a business, but for the talents and experience of their people.
So far, it’s typically only found in the tech field. Tech giants are less interested in whether the projects the teams have been working on are useful, but in the skills developed by their teams. Indeed, the projects they are working on are often simply shut down.
The best case scenario for an acquihire is either a fledgling or a failing startup. This is evident in that these are not gigantic money sinks – 86% of all acquihires are made for companies who have raised less than $5 million over their lifespans.
With this in mind, many acquihires are pointedly aimed at startups who are struggling to make their Series A funding round – the first hurdle after their initial funding – thus making it the business equivalent to a lion pouncing on a wounded gazelle, and offering it a cushy afterlife package before mauling it to death.
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