'The behavior that was prosecuted in the cases began in the early 2000s, when tech companies faced a talent shortage. They would “cold call” other firms’ employees with attractive job offers, believing them to be of higher quality than people who had applied for a job on their own. Bidding wars would often ensue, driving up worker compensation generally, not just for the workers being recruited. To avoid this outcome, some firms established no-poaching agreements with their rivals, typically ruling out making unsolicited job offers to any of a rival’s employees. Some agreements went further and proscribed bidding wars even when an employee independently applied for a job at a rival company.
One of the earliest no-poaching agreements was established in 2005 when Apple CEO Steve Jobs asked Google co-founder Sergey Brin to stop recruiting Apple workers. That agreement triggered a wave of pacts that eventually implicated 65 companies. By entering into agreements to not compete for workers, the firms were violating federal antitrust laws. The companies apparently felt that they had little to fear, since historically antitrust laws had rarely been enforced in labor collusion cases.'