Microsoft trying to poach Adobe staff

By siliconindia   |   Wednesday, 30 July 2008, 01:03 IST
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New Delhi: Microsoft will go to any extent to outshine its competitors. Now the company has resorted to tapping the talent at Adobe. It is in the process of engaging executive search firms to gather information about talent distribution across various product groups within Adobe India, the nature of work being carried out by each of these groups and the organization structure and hierarchy across these groups, reported The Economic Times. Microsoft's talent mapping exercises is focused on Adobe Developers working on technologies like Flash, Flashlite and Flex at the company's development centers in Bangalore and Noida. These two centers collectively employ close to 700 people primarily constituting product development specialists at various levels of seniority. The search firms have also been asked to target individuals within Adobe at different levels of seniority and gather information about their background, experience and role in the company. Microsoft India said in a statement, "Microsoft India, with its six distinct business units, offers a great opportunity to a variety of people: young people just finishing college, experienced hands, as well as Microsoft employees moving from other geographies to work here. The process of recruitment takes place via several routes' on campus, through recruitment agencies, online, through referrals by current employees. We hire people according to our needs and matching skill set, and obviously the experienced industry hires come from different companies, which could or could not be direct competitors." However, Adobe India refused to comment on the issue. Adobe has had an edge over Microsoft in the development of new technologies, more specifically those concerned with enhanced web-user experience as well as mobile computing technologies. Sources suggest that this is not the first instance Microsoft has attempted to gather such intelligence on their competition. Similar exercises targeting companies across the information technology space and focusing on specific functions have been initiated by them before and have effectively been used for talent acquisition purposes.