How much does it cost you when your employees are chatting with recruiters from other organizations, polishing up their LinkedIn pages, or just networking with employees at rival organizations?  The dust-up between two popular app-based car services, Uber and Lyft, has produced some very heated competing calculations of the economic damage of aggressive recruitment.

The Verge reported that Uber sent out brand ambassadors with burner phones and credit cards.  Ambassadors “request rides from Lyft and other competitors, recruit their drivers, and take multiple precautions to avoid detection.”  The story was picked up by CNN Money, which reported that Lyft’s internal data suggesting 5,560 canceled rides between October 2013 and August 2014.  Uber admitted enlisting average passengers: “We even recently ran a program where thousands of riders recruited drivers from many platforms, earning hundreds of dollars in Uber credits for each driver who tries Uber.”

The interesting thing here is not so much the question of whether Uber should curb its aggressive recruitment, but the phenomenon that, for all companies, strategic success increasingly depends on competitive advantage in talent markets as much as in product, service, and brand markets.

Strategic talent constraints are typically described in vast interconnected global supply chains and high-tech knowledge jobs like software engineers and research scientists.  Yet, the Uber-Lyft story plays out in the sharing economy for local services. With millions of drivers in every major city, should Lyft and Uber really be concerned about losing a few to their competitors?  Yes, because the pool of suitable and motivated drivers for ride-sharing is limited, and drivers are the only face to customers of Uber and Lyft.  Lock up the good drivers and you lock up the market.  In our book Beyond HR, Peter Ramstad and I described how Corning in the 1990’s could lock up float glass manufacturing in Central Europe by locking in a small population of qualified pivotal engineers.  So, this phenomenon isn’t new — but it is increasingly more pervasive, faster, and more varied.

And trying to stop aggressive recruitment is increasingly futile.  Jack-in-the-Box employees can chat up McDonalds’ associates during work hours, and engineers from one company strike up relationships with engineers in competitor companies. Zappos got rid of formal job postings in favor of an “Insider” website, for those who “might like to work for Zappos someday” to “sign up, stay in touch, talk to real people with real names and real faces, get to know us and allow us to get to know them.”  Microsoft recruited engineers for its Kinect for Windows team using a food truck called The Swinery, serving pepper bacon and toppings such as spray cheese, Sriracha, peanut butter, maple syrup, and chocolate sauce. The truck was parked at lunchtime near the Adobe and Google buildings, and staffed with Microsoft recruiters.

So Uber and Lyft should stop fixating on whether this recruitment activity is unseemly or not, and ask the more pivotal strategic question:  Will Lyft or Uber (or someone else) create the best “value proposition” for drivers?  That may be happening already. As this spat has played out, Uber and Lyft have both tried to depict themselves as being more devoted to their drivers’ welfare.

All leaders need to ask themselves the same question about their key employees. Just as with the ride-sharing drivers, technology is making alternative jobs easily available to your pivotal talent.  Everyone is familiar with Glass Door, Monster.com, and LinkedIn. More recent examples include Mediabistro.com’s  AgencySpy channel featuring “Cubes,” a video series that tours actual workers in cubicles at different creative agencies.  Plus, your talent will increasingly have alternatives that are more varied and accessible, and go well beyond traditional full-time employment.

In ride-sharing, the drivers can find alternatives and change employers with the tap of a phone.  Your pivotal talent today may seem safely insulated in a cocoon of traditional employment and HR practices like rewards, careers, and culture.  That’s what taxi and limousine services thought too, just a short time ago. If you’re still focusing on how to stop your employees from using work time to look for other jobs, you’re missing the bigger question:  Will your strategy make you the best place for the pivotal talent that embodies your strategic capability?

This blog first appeared on Harvard Business Review on 09/03/2014.

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