A signed loyalty pledge, a shared resume, and split placement fees drove the ruling
A New York appeals court on June 30, 2026 upheld a ruling against a recruiting firm that misused a rival's confidential candidate data.
For anyone who runs a talent function, the case is a cautionary one. A recruiter was passing his employer's candidate information to a competitor - and a New York court has now made that competitor pay.
At the center is Columbia Technology Corp, an information technology recruiting and staffing company that placed candidates with financial services clients and earned a commission on each successful hire. The company treated its candidate database as confidential information and a trade secret.
According to the company, one of its own recruiters passed candidate names from that database to EJR Search Partners, a rival firm run by two principals. EJR then placed those candidates with its own clients and kept the fees.
Two placements sat at the heart of the case, and the court treated them differently.
The first was a trade-secret question. EJR used one candidate's information, pulled from Columbia Technology's database, to place him and earned a $45,787 commission. EJR's principals argued they had known the candidate and his availability all along, so no secret was in play. The court was not persuaded. The secret, it said, was never the candidate's existence. It was the up-to-date resume the recruiter had taken from the database - a document capturing recent...
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