It’s not uncommon for big-name business leaders to get poached by major corporations. Take a recent example of Brian Niccol, the former CEO of Chipotle who got poached by Starbucks last summer.
But these behaviors have started with the earliest-career professionals—and Jamie Dimon doesn’t like it. Dimon, the illustrious CEO of JPMorgan Chase, spoke of his disdain for private equity’s poaching practices during a talk last fall 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 undergraduate business school students. “I’m going to say something a little different, okay, because I didn’t talk about character. The most important thing about people’s character, I think that’s unethical. I don’t like it.”
Dimon is referring to the wonky practice in which private equity firms begin aggressively recruiting newly minted junior bankers right at the beginning of their career—and even sometimes before. But the peculiarity of private equity’s recruiting practices is the jobs they’re wooing recent college grads with often don’t start until a date far into the future, usually around two years.
The college students watching Dimon’s interview knew exactly what he was talking about, with the crowd responding in laughter. But Dimon wasn’t entertained by this response, pushing the severity of the situation.
And JPMorgan has been on the case for a while.
“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 communication that was shared by the Litquidity account on Instagram, according to Business Insider. The post is no longer visible.
Not only does Dimon dislike private equity poaching, but he’s spearheading an effort to do away with it all together.
“I may eliminate it, regardless of what the private equity guys say or the people in the company first, I won’t pay for it,” Dimon said. “It’s not mercenaries. And I think it’s wrong to put you in the position.”
Dimon doesn’t like it because many of these junior bankers who are getting poached have already gone through some job training and have had access to confidential information right before taking the leap into private equity.
“It puts us in a bad position, and it puts us in a conflicted position,” Dimon said. “You are already working for somewhere else, and you’re dealing with highly confidential information from JPMorgan, and I just don’t like it.”
