Using a Sub-legal method in CI to gather crucial information

 

In the world of CI projects, we often want to gather as much information we can to solve strategic and tactical business problems.

If you are a part of an internal CI team in an organization, you probably need to use several methods of gathering whether it is active like interview someone or passive (in a non-negative manner) like analyzing new scholarly research.

Here is a problem you got from the CEO — He asked you to find out what is the new technology used by the company`s most strong competitor.

As the CI manager, you have to decide on the fittest gathering method to this problem. At this point, I would like to suggest a different approach to gain relevant information.

These four steps can be used to solve your problem:

1. Call production and marketing key employees from your company to a brainstorming meeting. Ask them what might be the characteristics of the new tech and what are the skills needed.
2. Search the net and relevant social media (e.g. LinkedIn) for the employees in the competing company that might practice the new tech or might have any information about it. make a list and save it.
3. Post a new job description with specific requirements, responsibilities, job duties, and skills required to perform a role. It also includes a list of common day-to-day tasks, equipment or tools used, whom the role reports to, and overall goals. Make sure the description fits the characteristics you gained from your brain-storm meeting.
4. Start a recruitment campaign for this job, and make sure you send the offers to the people on your list, by any means you can.

By these 4 steps, you can increase your chance to have at least one of the competitor`s employees from the list applying for the job, and by analyzing his skills and after that the interview, you might extract relevant information and write a very factual report about the competitor`s new tech.

So why is it Sub-legal? I argue that using this method is playing in the legal gray area. On the one hand, it might be very effective and at a low cost. But on the other hand, it is almost impersonating to something that you are not. first is the understanding that you do not really intend to hire someone to a real new job. But even if you do, then by using competitor`s employee innocence you make an unethical move.

I do not really know what is the right thing to be done. it might be a part of the trade secrets we use, and maybe some of us do not have a problem to stretch our ethical boarders. Anyway, I suggest consulting with a legal professional before using this method.

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