Tips on keeping top-staff poachers from the door

1. Don't wear rose-tinted glasses. "If you recruit really good people and you can't keep them, then you deserve to lose them," says Stephen Mockett, Swann Consulting's director. Know what motivates each staffer, give verbal recognition and help them to develop. Encourage internal promotion.

2. Limit the distribution of organisational charts and directories - crucial guides to company talent, says Wayne Outlaw, author of Smart Staffing: How to Hire, Reward and Keep Top Employees for Your Growing Company (Upstart Publishing Co). And watch for employee web pages. Personal web pages are "a headhunter's dream," he says.

3. Strengthen the frontline. Teach receptionists how to screen out trolling headhunters. Paul Sampson, of the Germany-based advice company The Anti-Headhunting Agency, says one tactic of headhunters is the "lost caller syndrome," where headhunters dial through a company at random, asking questions, whose answers eventually lead them to the information they really want.

4. Build smart alliances. One of the best ways to keep headhunters from poaching talent is to put them on retainer.

5. No secrets. Create a company culture where people are encouraged to be open with bosses if they have spoken to a headhunter or are considering another job.