By Matt Harrington, BCBA · Behaviorist Book Club · April 2026 · 12 min read

Playing Nice in the ABA Sandbox: Ethical Considerations Around Staff Poaching in ABA

Overview & Clinical Significance

The ABA field is experiencing a workforce crisis that has profound implications for service delivery, organizational sustainability, and ethical practice. As demand for ABA services has grown exponentially following insurance mandates and increased autism diagnosis rates, the supply of qualified RBTs and BCBAs has not kept pace. This supply-demand imbalance has created competitive dynamics around staff recruitment that raise significant ethical questions for the profession. Staff poaching, the active recruitment of employees from competing ABA organizations, has become a contentious issue that sits at the intersection of market competition, professional ethics, and client welfare.

The clinical significance of staff recruitment practices extends far beyond organizational HR concerns. When a key staff member leaves an ABA organization, the effects ripple through the client caseload. Clients may experience disruption in services, loss of rapport with a trusted provider, delays in treatment progress, and sometimes complete gaps in service delivery while replacements are found and trained. For individuals with autism, who may have particular difficulty adapting to changes in personnel, the loss of a familiar therapist can be especially disruptive.

The ethical dimensions of staff poaching are complex because they involve competing legitimate interests. Organizations have a legitimate interest in maintaining a stable workforce to serve their clients. Individual practitioners have a legitimate interest in pursuing career opportunities that advance their professional development and compensation. Clients have a legitimate interest in continuity of care and access to qualified providers. The organizations doing the recruiting may be addressing their own staffing needs to serve their own clients. These competing interests create genuine ethical tensions that cannot be resolved by simple rules.

The conference session addresses these tensions by examining the relevant ethical standards, exploring the practical dynamics of staff recruitment in the ABA field, and proposing principles for navigating recruitment ethically. The session is particularly timely given the rapid growth of the ABA industry, which has created a seller's market for qualified staff and increased the frequency and aggressiveness of recruitment practices that raise ethical concerns.

For behavior analysts in leadership positions, understanding the ethical dimensions of recruitment is essential for making decisions that protect client welfare, maintain professional relationships, and sustain organizational viability. For behavior analysts considering job changes, understanding these dynamics helps them navigate transitions ethically and in the best interest of the clients they serve.

Background & Context

The workforce challenges in ABA have been building for over a decade. The combination of state insurance mandates requiring coverage of ABA services, increased autism prevalence estimates, growing public awareness of ABA as an evidence-based treatment, and the expansion of ABA into new populations and settings has created demand that far exceeds the available workforce. The shortage is most acute at the RBT level, where turnover rates in many organizations exceed 50 percent annually, but BCBA shortages are also significant in many regions.

This workforce context has transformed the competitive landscape of ABA service provision. Organizations compete not only for clients but also, and increasingly primarily, for staff. The ability to recruit and retain qualified staff has become the primary constraint on organizational growth, and some organizations have responded with aggressive recruitment practices that target employees of other ABA providers.

The practice of staff poaching takes many forms, from passive recruitment through job postings that target employees of specific competitors to active recruitment through direct contact with individual employees. Some organizations offer significant financial incentives, such as signing bonuses, higher hourly rates, or loan repayment assistance, that are designed to attract staff away from their current employers. While competitive compensation is legitimate and even beneficial for the workforce, some recruitment practices cross ethical lines.

The BACB Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts (2022) does not explicitly address staff poaching by name, but several code provisions are relevant. The ethical analysis requires considering the effects of recruitment practices on clients, on the profession, and on the individuals involved. This multi-stakeholder analysis is characteristic of the complex ethical reasoning that the session promotes.

The broader professional context includes the relationship between ABA organizations. In many communities, ABA providers must collaborate on behalf of shared clients, refer clients to one another, and participate together in professional organizations and advocacy efforts. Aggressive staff poaching can damage these professional relationships, creating animosity that ultimately harms the collaborative ecosystem on which clients depend.

The session's presenters bring diverse perspectives including clinical leadership, organizational management, and business operations, reflecting the multifaceted nature of the issue. The staff poaching dilemma cannot be fully understood or addressed from a purely clinical, purely ethical, or purely business perspective; it requires integration of all three.

Clinical Implications

The clinical implications of staff turnover driven by poaching are direct and measurable. When an RBT leaves an ABA organization, the clients they were serving experience immediate disruption. The replacement process, including posting the position, screening candidates, training new hires, and building rapport with clients, can take weeks to months. During this transition period, clients may receive reduced hours of service, services from less experienced providers, or no services at all.

For clients with autism, continuity of care is particularly important. Many clients develop rapport with specific therapists over time, and the therapeutic relationship itself contributes to treatment effectiveness. Some clients may exhibit increased challenging behavior during transitions, regress on previously acquired skills, or resist engagement with new providers. Parents and families also experience disruption, as they must build trust and communication with a new therapist and may need to re-explain their child's history, preferences, and needs.

The clinical implications extend beyond individual client disruption. When an organization experiences high turnover, the cumulative effect on service quality is substantial. Organizational knowledge is lost with each departing employee. Remaining staff may be stretched thin, leading to burnout and further turnover. Training resources are diverted from skill advancement to onboarding. And the organization's ability to maintain consistent treatment approaches across clients is compromised.

Behavior analysts who recruit staff from other organizations should consider these clinical implications as part of their ethical analysis. While hiring a qualified therapist may solve a staffing problem for one organization, it may create a staffing problem for another, and the clients of both organizations are affected. This is not to suggest that staff should never change employers, but rather that the effects on clients should be considered in how transitions are managed.

The clinical implications of staff poaching also include effects on treatment fidelity. New staff members, even those who are experienced RBTs, require time to learn each client's specific treatment protocols, data collection procedures, and behavioral patterns. During the learning period, treatment fidelity may be lower, which can affect client progress. Organizations that experience frequent turnover may find that their treatment fidelity data reflect a chronic state of new-employee learning curves rather than stable implementation.

Transition planning becomes a critical clinical skill in this context. When staff departures are known in advance, organizations can plan transitions that minimize client disruption: overlapping the departing and incoming therapists, gradually transferring rapport, maintaining detailed documentation of client protocols and preferences, and communicating transparently with families about the transition.

Ethical Considerations

The ethical considerations surrounding staff poaching in ABA are complex and involve multiple provisions of the BACB Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts (2022) as well as broader professional ethics principles.

Code 2.01 (Providing Effective Treatment) is relevant because staff stability directly affects treatment quality. When organizations lose staff due to poaching, their ability to provide consistent, effective treatment is compromised. Behavior analysts in leadership positions have an ethical obligation to consider how their recruitment practices affect the clients served by other organizations, not just their own staffing needs.

Code 2.08 (Communicating About Services) is relevant when organizations make claims about their services or working conditions during recruitment. Recruitment messaging that disparages competing organizations, makes inflated promises about working conditions, or misrepresents the nature of available positions raises ethical concerns about truthfulness and professional conduct.

Code 1.04 (Integrity) requires behavior analysts to be honest and to promote an ethical culture. Recruitment practices that involve deception, such as contacting employees under false pretenses or making promises that will not be kept, violate this standard. Organizations should compete for talent honestly, through genuine advantages in compensation, culture, and professional development, rather than through manipulation or misrepresentation.

Code 1.01 (Being Truthful) applies to all communications during the recruitment process. This includes truthful representation of the available position, the organization's culture and policies, compensation and benefits, career advancement opportunities, and the nature of the client population served. Inflating any of these to lure staff away from a competitor violates the truthfulness standard.

Code 2.10 (Collaborating with Colleagues) is relevant because staff poaching can damage the collaborative relationships between organizations that are necessary for effective client care. In many communities, behavior analysts at different organizations need to collaborate on behalf of shared clients, coordinate referrals, and work together on professional development and advocacy. Aggressive recruitment practices can create antagonistic relationships that undermine these collaborative activities.

Code 2.05 (Rights and Prerogatives of Clients) is relevant because clients have the right to continuity of care and should not be collateral damage of inter-organizational competition. When staff transitions affect clients, the clients' rights to be informed and to have their care needs considered should be prioritized.

The ethical analysis should also consider the rights of individual practitioners. RBTs and BCBAs have the right to seek employment opportunities that best serve their career development and personal needs. Ethical concerns about staff poaching should not be used to justify attempts to restrict employee mobility or suppress fair competition for talent. The ethical issue is not that staff change employers but rather how that change is facilitated and how the effects on clients are managed.

Assessment & Decision-Making

Navigating the ethical dimensions of staff recruitment requires structured assessment and decision-making by behavior analysts in both recruiting and losing organizations.

For organizations considering recruiting staff from competitors, a structured ethical assessment should include several questions. What is the likely effect on the clients currently served by the staff members being recruited? Can the transition be managed in a way that minimizes client disruption? Are the recruitment methods honest and transparent, or do they involve deception or misrepresentation? Will the recruitment damage collaborative relationships with other organizations in ways that could ultimately harm clients? Are there alternative strategies for addressing staffing needs that do not involve targeting specific competitors' employees, such as developing training programs, improving retention, or recruiting from non-ABA talent pools?

For organizations experiencing staff departures due to competitor recruitment, decision-making should focus on several areas. How can client transitions be managed to minimize disruption? What retention strategies could be implemented to reduce vulnerability to future staff losses? Is the organization offering competitive compensation and working conditions? Are there systemic issues contributing to staff departures, such as inadequate supervision, excessive caseloads, or poor organizational culture, that should be addressed? What policies should be in place regarding employee transitions, such as reasonable notice periods and transition planning requirements?

For individual practitioners considering job changes, ethical assessment should include how will this transition affect my current clients and what can I do to minimize disruption? Am I being recruited through ethical means, and are the representations being made about the new position accurate? Am I making this decision based on genuine professional and personal factors, or am I being unduly influenced by financial incentives that may not be sustainable? What obligations do I have to my current employer regarding notice, transition planning, and knowledge transfer?

Organizational policies can support ethical decision-making in this domain. Reasonable non-solicitation agreements that restrict direct poaching without unduly restricting employee mobility represent one approach. Transition protocols that specify minimum notice periods, client transition planning requirements, and knowledge transfer expectations provide structure for managing departures ethically. Competitive compensation reviews ensure that the organization is not losing staff due to below-market compensation that could be corrected.

The profession as a whole should consider collaborative solutions to the workforce crisis that reduce the zero-sum dynamics driving staff poaching. Investing in training pipelines, supporting educational programs, and advocating for policies that expand the workforce would benefit all organizations and their clients more than competing ever more aggressively for a fixed pool of qualified staff.

What This Means for Your Practice

Whether you are an organizational leader, a supervisor, or an individual practitioner, the ethical dimensions of staff recruitment affect your practice.

If you lead an ABA organization, invest in retention before recruitment. The most ethical and most effective strategy for maintaining a stable workforce is creating working conditions that staff do not want to leave. This includes competitive compensation, supportive supervision, manageable caseloads, professional development opportunities, and an organizational culture that values and respects staff. When you do need to recruit, do so honestly and with awareness of the effects on clients served by other organizations.

If you supervise staff, be attentive to signs of dissatisfaction that might lead to turnover. Address concerns proactively. Provide meaningful supervision that supports both professional development and job satisfaction. When staff do give notice, facilitate a thoughtful transition that prioritizes client welfare.

If you are considering a job change, plan your transition with client welfare in mind. Provide adequate notice, participate in transition planning, and ensure that your current clients' needs are addressed before you depart. Evaluate new opportunities critically, ensuring that the representations being made are accurate and that the position genuinely serves your professional development rather than just offering a temporary financial incentive.

At the professional level, engage in advocacy and collaborative efforts to address the workforce crisis. Support training programs, mentor aspiring behavior analysts, and participate in professional organizations that are working to expand the ABA workforce. The long-term solution to staff poaching dynamics is a sufficient supply of qualified professionals, which requires collective action across the profession.