How not to run a company

Before going to law school I spent some time as the head of the Information Technology Consultant Recruitment Department at Bankers Trust, so I know a thing or two about how recruitment is handled from the recruiter, recruitee and recruited sides of things, and one thing I will never understand is why employers are so cheap when it comes to compensating their current employees for referrals. When a current employee makes a referral there is much more pressure to make sure that you only forward along a qualified candidate, whereas a recruiter will send pretty much any resume that comes through the fax. Yet an employer will pay only a few grand for the employee referral and often make the employee wait until both they and the person they referred have been there for 6 months before offering compensation. Whereas, a recruiter will generally take 20% of base salary after 90 days. Explain this to me. Employers could at least make this interesting, as my friend says,

and pro rate the bonus on a monthly basis and then on the first of each month you could take your "winnings" or double down and let it ride and put some of your own salary on the table. They need to spice things up with some exciting, high stakes, vegas action!

What actually spurred this rant on was a Business 2.0 article that concluded

If you really don't trust your employees, maybe you should get different ones. If you do trust them, or want to, treat them accordingly.

The article discusses management's implementation of technologies to monitor employees' Web usage in the work place. It goes on to say that monitoring also induces what academics call psychological reactance: the tendency of people to rebel against constraints. Who knew that treating employees like lab rats would actually cause them to feel completely undermined.