What if all hiring was like NBA free agency

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What if the frenzy we see when the NBA free agency opens up was brought to the everyday working man? You wake up in early July and companies are aggressively signing people from other companies. Offering guaranteed pay over multiple years. Superstar engineers trading employers. Creatives and sales leaders teaming up with a rockstar engineer to form their version of the big 3.

The everyday employee is always a free agent. At most times you aren’t looking, but the most successful are always listening. Hearing from recruiters what others are making at other firms. What the demand is for different types of talent.

On top of the frenzy of free agency, what if we had the ability for companies to make trades? If we as employees signed multi-year deals with an employer and then woke up one morning to an email that we had been traded to another firm. One day you are working at Google as an engineer on the search team and then you wake up and you find out you have been traded to Yahoo. What a bummer. Or maybe you are a rockstar salesperson working at Amazon on the AWS team and then one day you find out they traded you for a package of young engineers and two retiring people in operations (aka expiring contracts) to a company in another country like Rakuten in Japan.

The excitement of the NBA is the trade deadline and the free agency. As a Warrior fan, we lost one of the splash brothers, Klay Thompson, to the Dallas Mavericks. At the end of the day, the NBA is a business. Klay was paid when he blew out his knee and Achilles. They showed him respect by giving him a big payday years ago even though he was injured. In many respects, this is similar to employers giving long-tenured executives increasingly high pay and bonuses even though their skills and value may be deteriorating.

As Klay moves to Texas, I think about how exciting it would be if publicly traded companies had free agency periods and trade deadlines for their employees. Maybe one day….