“Poaching”: how companies fight for engineering competencies

The paper analyzes the practice of “poaching” engineers by some organizations from others, which is unfolding in the Russian labor market. Using the example of industrial robotics, it shows how companies perceive, interpret and resist such a practice. The struggle for engineers, which arose due to a shortage of qualified personnel, has become a serious challenge for small and medium-sized organizations that do not have sufficient resources to retain employees and resist “personnel poaching” by large companies. Based on interviews with industry experts and heads of industrial robotics companies (N = 54), the paper reveals how relations of dominance and contestation of it are built-in into the economic field at the symbolic level (“projects of shared meanings”) in relation to the struggle for engineering personnel and competencies. The study showed that small companies are forced to recognize the right of large players to poach “alien” engineers, but many of them (“challenger companies”) try to resist the logic of dominance, using symbolic resources and accumulated engineering competencies. “Challengers” are building “their niche”, trying to redefine the distribution of power in the competitive struggle for personnel, including through the formation of shared meanings and self-presentation.