Recruiting top talent to join your company? Or, are you an employee feeling like you’ve been sold a pipe dream only to be terminated shortly after?
If you follow the wearable tech space, you may have seen the recent news that Bryan Lynch, Apple’s head hardware engineer overseeing home devices, left the tech giant to join Oura. For those who have yet to give in to the wearable tech movement, Oura makes the Oura Ring, a sleek, sensor-laden ring that tracks personal health metrics, similar to the Apple Watch.
For tech enthusiasts, Lynch’s move from Apple to Oura sparked a number of theories about Oura’s suite of new tech and products.
For employment law, the move raises interesting (or not so interesting) contractual and legal issues.
Transitions like Lynch’s happen all the time in competitive industries. A rival company finds a key senior employee, makes an attractive offer, and the employee jumps ship.
What does not always get discussed, however, is the legal risk and exposure attached to the recruitment of top talent.
In Ontario, the concept of inducement arises when an employer actively recruits an employee away from secure, long-standing employment. The concept is straightforward: if you convince someone to leave a stable job with promises of a better opportunity and you later terminate that person without cause, the courts will attach liability to the inducing employer that may include recognition of years of service well before the date of employment started.
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