I wouldn't stop it -- I'd want to talk about it to understand why. If it was because they were following advice they read somewhere because worried it would influence their offer, I'd try to dispel that myth within the context of Automattic. If they didn't believe me, we probably don't have the level of trust needed to work well together.

Our culture is really built on two-way trust: since we're distributed and seldom see each other you don't know how someone is going about their work, and most of our HR policies come down to the honor system. The company places an incredibly amount of trust in employees, and vice versa people place a great amount of trust in the company, including that we'll do our best to treat them fairly. It's a responsibility the folks on the operations side of Automattic, including myself, take very seriously.