What's the plan after hiring freezes are announced?
Too many of us in HR and Talent Acquisition functions have been there before. We’re super busy building frameworks for growth, and filling current hiring requisitions, and building diverse talent pipelines, and designing lovely candidate experience strategies and then pop! We find ourselves at a loose end, and wondering about job security.
But here’s the rub. Companies typically only effect redundancies for roles deemed to be non business critical. And if you’re viewed as only useful for helping to hire during times of growth, then you need to be offering so much more, not just now, but all of the time. If you achieve this, then at best, you’ll be kept on because you’re a critical “right hand” person to leadership teams. Or it might just help you keep your job for a little longer. And at worst, you’ll still be let go with others, but you’ll have built your value up to a point where your employer is more likely to want to rehire you, the moment they have the option to.
We've lost count of the number of conversations with Business and HR executives about their need to staff up their TA functions after a period of downsizing. When we ask “why don’t you just hire back past TA team members?” we are told “no, they weren’t that good anyway”.
Right now, the quality of the data you provide and your pro active initiatives could be critical to elevating your true value to the business. Here are 9 things you should and can be doing right now:
As far as is practical, know the makeup of your current workforce, with the “who, where, what they do, what they cost, what they earn, and what business critical knowledge or critical external relationships (customers, suppliers, media) they may have”. It will be a different but useful angle for business leaders to assess risk when considering staff cuts.
Know the actual roles that are critical to maintain business operations, and those that could be cut. Of the latter, know which if any will be difficult to hire for again, and why, with the data to back you up. Again, it will help the business to assess risk.
Know the historic cost, time and difficulty to hire for any roles deemed as business critical. Are there high performance and well respected people in those roles currently? If not, now might be the opportunity to upgrade that talent...
Know the immediate luxury items you have within the TA function that could be axed to save costs and move on that now. Better that it’s you terminating supplier contracts in a respectful manner that protects your relationship for future partnerships, rather than it being done by a faceless axe from procurement.
Know the suppliers with whom you could potentially negotiate extended payment terms. It could be a huge help to your company's cash flow...
Build and deliver on a simple, low cost, communications strategy for candidates you have in process right now. You don’t want to lose the people you need and want, because they’re unsettled by negative rumblings about your company.
Build and deliver on a simple, low cost, communications strategy for future potential candidates, that will run through the hiring freeze period. After times of upheaval, high performance candidates often look back on the messages that were issued during crisis by their potential employers.
Build and deliver on an outplacement service that offers support to all of your company’s employees who are losing their jobs. With so many organisations being more sensitive today to their brand and how it can be affected from the way they treat employees, your business leaders should have interest in people still speaking positively about the company, and the dignity and respect and support they experienced despite being laid off.
Build the predictions of how long restaffing could take, and at what cost, when the company enters growth mode again. We’ve watched with wry irony when companies slash their work forces to contain costs, only to incur greater expense in rehiring those people as contractors within months of their exit.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of actions that should be high on your priority list. For sure though, anything that provides quality data and enablement of results to the business right now, better be more important to you than building a fancier metrics scorecard.
About the Author
Leanne Morris is well known as a both an outspoken advocate and critic of the HR profession. With long standing networks across 94 countries in all specialist areas of the function, and a multi- continent work history, she is a sought after subject matter expert on international HR hiring trends and HR hiring best practice.