Woman Gets Threatening Message On LinkedIn From Rival CEO: 'Don’t Poach My Employees'

Many people use LinkedIn to expand their business network, seek jobs, or reach out to potential candidates for hiring. However, recently a founder of a marketing firm got a threatening message from a rival company. Ali Schwanke, founder of Simple Strat, shared a screenshot of a message she got on LinkedIn from Carlos Pantoja, the CEO of Optima Solutions. In his short message, Pantoja asked Ali to not “poach” his employees. He wrote, “Your first and only warning is do not try to poach my employees or you will have no employees yourself.”

In business, poaching means going out of one’s way to hire employees from the competing business. Often poaching is done to get insider information about the rival business. While sharing the screenshot of Pantoja’s message, Ali wrote, “Instead of being pitch slapped, now LinkedIn comes with threats. WTF is this.” This post got over three million views and over 15,000 likes since it was shared on May 1.

Many people praised Ali for not blurring Carlos Pantoja’s identity. An X user wrote, “Thank you for not blurring his name and face. He deserves the “attention” from this.”

Another person wrote, “Well if they are threatened then you’re doing something great. My passive aggressive side of me wants to reply with ‘Come at me bro’ or ‘hey your insecurity is showing, might want to tuck that back in’.”

Someone else observed, “Demanding you don’t commit tortious interference seems like a prudent thing for him to do. Furthermore, you posting it just gave him significant evidence that you committed such violations with reckless disregard and that if you do it again, you knew there was a contract. Good work.”

In a follow-up post, Ali mentioned that she had never heard of Carlos Pantoja or his company Optima Solutions.

The ethics of poaching in business are complicated. Many believe that companies are well within their right to approach and attract talent by offering better pay and benefits. While others consider poaching as sabotage. In 2015, four big companies, namely Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe compromised with their former employees for a class action lawsuit that alleged that the tech companies blocked the career advancement of its engineers by entering an undisclosed “no-poaching” agreement among themselves. The engineers argued that this unspoken “no-poaching” rule made it hard for them to shift jobs even as companies maintained low wages. As per the New York Times, the companies agreed to pay a settlement figure of $415 million.