Dive Brief:

• Amazon is one of the top three poachers of employees in the tech industry, while Facebook is the biggest social media poacher, according to a new infographic from recruiting firm Talentful.

• Talentful examined 15 cases of "employee headhunting and company switching" to find out which companies poach the most employees from rivals. The company found Google poached the most number of employees from rivals, but Apple poached the most employees from Intel, IBM and Microsoft. Overall, the largest poach within the industry is employees moving from IBM to Microsoft.

• Staff trading happens all the time between companies, according to a Talentful interview with 425 Business. "And every time one company hires a staff member from another, they’re not just bringing in that person – they’re bringing in their whole network. People like to work with familiar teams who know the way they work, and they end up bringing their colleagues with them."

Dive Insight:

Talentful used LinkedIn 'past company' data to determine the level of employee poaching taking place. It’s not clear whether Talentful was able to discern whether the employee left on his or her own or was lured away by a competitor, however.

The bottom line according to Talentful is poaching is standard operating procedure in the tech world, and there’s no end in sight. The shortage of tech workers will likely continue to drive poaching in the industry. For tech companies, finding workers with proven tech skills that have worked at competing organizations is akin to finding a pot of gold.

IT has experienced 12% job growth since 2012, the fastest job growth of any industry, having added approximately 472,000 jobs since 2012, according to analysis by CareerBuilder and labor market data provider Emsi released last month. But there are also huge talent gaps, with some skill sets in particular high demand. Until there is a surplus of tech workers, which seems unlikely, trading tech talent between companies will persist.