It is not uncommon for great business leaders to be poached by major corporations. Take the recent example of Brian Niccol, the former CEO of Chipotle who was poached by Starbucks last month.
But this behavior started with professionals in the early years of their careers – and Jamie Dimon doesn’t like it. Dimon, the illustrious CEO of JPMorgan Chase, spoke last week of his disdain for the poaching practices of private equity during a lecture at Georgetown University’s Psaros Center for Financial Markets and Policy.
“I know a lot of you work at JPMorgan, you take a job at a private equity shop before you even start with us,” Dimon told a crowd of business school students. “I’m going to say something else, okay, because I didn’t talk about character. I think the most important thing about people’s character is that it is unethical. I don’t like it.”
Dimon is referring to the shaky practice whereby private equity firms begin aggressively recruiting entry-level young bankers from the start of their careers – and sometimes even earlier. But the quirk of private equity’s hiring practices is that the jobs they pursue recent college graduates often don’t start until a date far in the future, usually around two years.
The students watching Dimon’s interview knew exactly what he was talking about, and the audience responded with laughter. But Dimon was not happy with this answer, which underlined the seriousness of the situation.
And JPMorgan has been on this case for some time.
“We understand that the practice of interviewing and accepting a role at another firm has accelerated and is happening even earlier in your career with us,” JPMorgan wrote to new bankers in a notice shared by the Litquidity account on Instagram , according to Business Insider. The message is no longer visible.
Not only does Dimon hate private equity poaching, but he is leading the effort to eliminate it all together.
“Maybe I’ll eliminate it, no matter what the private equity guys say or what the people in the company say first, I won’t pay for it,” Dimon said. ‘They are not mercenaries. And I think it’s wrong to put you in this position.”
Dimon doesn’t like it because many of these young bankers being poached have already completed professional training and had access to confidential information just before making the jump to private equity.
“It puts us in a bad position, and it puts us in a conflicted position,” Dimon said. “You’re already working somewhere else and you’re dealing with highly confidential information from JPMorgan, and I just don’t like that.”
