Salesforce CEO Benioff deputizes staff to poach Siebel employees

Via e-mail last night, I received a copy of an internal memo that salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff distributed to his staff.  After beating the drum about how well the company is doing and reminding his employees that they get a $5,000 bonus if they personally recommend a job candidate to the company and that person gets hired, Benioff wrote the following (note the special e-mail address):

We are today also announcing a $5000 signing bonus for current Siebel employees that we hire before December 31st. Following the proposed acquisition of Siebel by Oracle many existing Siebel employees may be concerned about their career prospects, we want to offer them an alternative to an environment of declining commissions, confused customers and uncertainty around career viability. We would be delighted to hear from any Siebel employee that would like to join our company that meets our rigorous standard for excellence and dedication to customer success. Siebel employees can email us for a confidential discussion or meeting with a Salesforce.com executive through siebelsurvivor@salesforce.com.

The e-mail goes on to say that not all Siebel employees are eligible.  Such competitive poaching is commonplace within market segments where one of the key players goes through a merger or acquisition as Siebel recently did when Oracle announced it would be acquiring the customer relationship management (CRM) solution provider.

Meanwhile, in other employee-poaching news, a California court has granted an injunction to Nuance Communications that temporarily bars Yahoo! from employing the 13 engineers that Nuance says were gutted from its research and development department by the search giant.   Whereas Nuance has so far been successful at keeping Yahoo! from poaching its employees, the fate of Microsoft's case against Google for snatching Kai Fu Lee from its clutches to run Google's operation in China is still in limbo (Microsoft has offered to settle the case).