You spend tens of thousands recruiting, training, and mentoring top talent—only to lose them to a client.
Your client loves them.
And then… they hire them.
Now you’re short an employee and a client. Brutal.
One of my clients faced this exact situation: a customer hired away their star employee. Fortunately, their contract had a recruitment fee clause—so instead of being left high and dry, they got a healthy payout and the customer came back for more services.
Why Non-Solicits Don’t Cut It
If you’ve seen this before, you know the standard playbook: throw a non-solicit clause into the contract. But here’s the problem:
- They’re notoriously hard to enforce.
- In places like California, they’re basically unenforceable.
- If you sue, you’ll spend years in litigation, rack up legal fees, and still lose the client (and probably the employee).
Even Steve Jobs once sent Adobe’s CEO a thinly veiled threat about cross-hiring talent.
Meanwhile, in 2025, Meta is reportedly offering AI researchers multimillion-dollar deals. Their CTO, Andrew Bosworth, makes $20–24 million a year. In a talent market like this, non-solicits won’t save you.
The Cost of Doing Nothing
Let’s say you take the “wait and see” approach:
- You recruit and train great employees.
- They deliver real value to your customers.
- Then your customer hires them—and you get nothing.
Unless you want to burn bridges in court, you lose on every front: employee, client, time, and money.
The Smarter Move: Recruitment Fee Clauses
Instead of gambling on unenforceable promises, write protection into your contracts.
A recruitment fee clause ensures that if your client hires your employee, you don’t walk away empty-handed. You recover some of the cost of recruiting, training, and developing your people—without destroying the client relationship.
Imagine being Andrew Bosworth’s former employer and getting a cut of that Meta contract. Not bad, right?
👉 Learn more about how we draft clauses that work in real-world contracts
