Acqui-hiring or Acq-hiring (a

portmanteau A portmanteau word, or portmanteau (, ) is a blend of wordsneologism A neologism Greek νέο- ''néo''(="new") and λόγος /''lógos'' meaning "speech, utterance"] is a relatively recent or isolated term, word, or phrase that may be in the process of entering common use, but that has not been fully accepted int ...

which describes the process of Mergers and acquisitions, acquiring a company primarily to

recruit __NOTOC__ Recruit can refer to: Military * Military recruitment * Recruit training, in the military * '' Rekrut'' (English: Recruit), a military recruit or low rank in German-speaking countries * Seaman recruit Books *''Le Réquisitionnaire'' (E ...

its employees, rather than to gain control of its products or services.

Ben Zimmer Benjamin Zimmer (born 1971) is an American linguist, lexicographer, and language commentator. He is a language columnist for ''The Wall Street Journal'' and contributing editor for ''The Atlantic''. He was formerly a language columnist for ''The ...

traced the derivation of the phrase to a blog post in May 2005. Talent acquisitions can provide a relatively favorable

exit strategy An exit strategy is a means of leaving one's current situation, either after a predetermined objective has been achieved, or as a strategy to mitigate failure. An organisation or individual without an exit strategy may be in a quagmire. At wors ...

for employees, with the prestige of being bought by a larger company, combined with the typical process of hiring. A risk to talent acquisitions are employees that are not interested in working within a corporate environment — which may cause them to defect elsewhere. By the early 2010s, acqui-hiring had become increasingly common in

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...

-backed

startup companies A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship refers to all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that never intend t ...

, especially within the competitive

technology Technology is the application of knowledge to reach practical goals in a specifiable and reproducible way. The word ''technology'' may also mean the product of such an endeavor. The use of technology is widely prevalent in medicine, science, ...

sector (where skilled

software engineer Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term ''p ...

s working for startups were considered lucrative). By March 2013,

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

was the largest performer of talent acquisitions, with 12 over the previous five fiscal quarters. One such Facebook purchase in 2009,

FriendFeed FriendFeed was a real-time feed aggregator that consolidated updates from social media and social networking websites, social bookmarking websites, blogs and microblogging updates, as well as any type of RSS/Atom feed. It was created in 2007 by ...

, brought several high-profile

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

alumni into the company, including

Bret Taylor Bret Taylor (born July 10, 1980) is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. He is most notable for co-creating Google Maps and his tenures as the CTO of Facebook (now Meta Platforms), the chairman of Twitter, Inc.'s board of directors pr ...

— who became Facebook's chief technology officer shortly after the purchase.

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Man ...

, and Google ranked alongside Facebook as a similarly major user of talent acquisitions. Typically, a company that performs a talent acquisition does not show an interest in the products and services of the target, which results in them being discontinued upon the purchase (so that their staff will focus exclusively on incorporating their knowledge into their new employer's projects) or some time afterward. The file sharing service Drop.io was shut down after its 2010 purchase by Facebook, while FriendFeed was left dormant (with no new feature development and a slowly shrinking user base) until 2015, when it was discontinued.

References

Recruitment Mergers and acquisitions {{Portal, Business