to answer a question: hiring of senior faculty is a lot like middle school dating.
There's the "if I would, what would you answer?"
followed by the "well, if you were to ask, and I were to answer, what would you do?"
Delicate, tiresome, and occasionally effective.
Sometimes it becomes a non-terminating descending loop.
And sometimes it is a total headfake.
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As the occasional target of the head fakes, I feel your pain.
Headfakes are painful to both sides.
Sometimes they are genuine indecisiveness, sometimes planned.
We hates the headfakes, yes we does.
But, if the game is to be played by poaching rules, then the prey must game the rules.
There's a very simple solution to this problem.
Sure, don't play the game.
Not always as easy as it sounds, but sometimes it is best to just go.
I was thinking from the institution's point of view: hire junior faculty instead.
In my somewhat biased opinion, luring senior people is only really necessary when they are brought in to build a new department. The rest of the time it's a zero-sum game in terms of total science, the only thing that really changes is that the hiring institution gets a brief period of enhanced bragging rights.
You're too young to be thinking from the institional point of view... and you're missing some angles.
But, if US institutions were to do such, watch the universities become unions shops very fast, with negotiated seniority based pay raises and promotions.
Or implode in about a decade. You need the perception of the threat of mobility.
Well, thanks for the compliment. I'm getting younger every year.
Right now, it is very attractive for institutions to circle Certain Places (like UC) to lure away those that can be lured. However, the net effect of hiring a senior person away from a UC, instead of a regular search for a junior person, is going to be to reduce the pool of permanent jobs by one, since it may be a long time before UC can run a search to replace that person. UC is not alone in this I'm sure, they are just a big target.
It is unfortunate that the only way to get a bump in pay grade or more resources is to wave another offer sheet in front of the administration. It consumes time of the faculty member and two departments. I don't have a solution for that. University administrations create the incentive for this themselves by imposing this reward structure.
At Rutgers, both grad students and professors are unionized (same union). Governance and seniority are pretty much the same as anywhere else. The main difference is that the grad students, when on a RA/TA, are state employees, still get paid badly, but get the good health insurance. Also, I suspect pay scales are more uniform across departments, but it isn't that big of a deal.
I have noticed that many otherwise-liberal faculty get very agitated at the thought of faculty or especially grad student unions (see battles at Yale, NYU) and predict they will cramp all academic decision-making. What surprises me is that they ignore the perfectly good examples, like Rutgers, showing that there is little to fear. I think it's partly a class thing: unions are associated with blue-collar jobs and profs want to think of themselves as professionals and above that.
I think this attitude would make it hard for universities to become union shops even if profs desperately needed that to resist admin power grabs. However, I see your point that the threat of mobility is an important incentive.