Causes and Ideas on How Layoffs Can Be Avoided
It is sad and frustrating to see so many people being laid off. These layoffs are a classic example of little or no strategic talent planning, whether from large, well-known firms or smaller, less prominent ones.
If a firm had to dispose of millions of dollars of excess inventory, heads would have rolled, and the stock price would have plummeted. But when it comes to people, leaders are rewarded with higher stock prices when they dispose of people. This is shameful and harmful to the organization, people, and society. Most, if not all, of the recent layoffs, could have been prevented by better planning and a deeper understanding of the talent supply chain and talent market.
Organizations have thrown people at problems that should have been solved with a combination of planning, technology, and the use of the entire talent ecosystem. This ecosystem is large, varied, and capable of providing many services that permanent employees were hired to do as demand peaked during the pandemic. The diagram (Figure 1) below shows the scope of this ecosystem.
Imagine that rather than hiring dozens of recruiters, a firm instead outsourced some of its needs to an RPO, hired a mix of temporary and contract recruiters, and demanded that recruiters use the technology that many firms have already purchased, such as sourcing applications that reduce the need for a sourcer, screening, and assessment software to screen candidates, and scheduling software to lower the need for people to do the scheduling. Other applications can also be used to reduce the number of needed recruiters.
Recruiting leaders are partially responsible for poor planning, but not entirely. Ideally it would be a shared responsibility with HR, and leadership.
But here are some ideas on what a recruiting leader could do to increase the chances of keeping her staff intact during a downturn and also help reduce the need for layoffs in the organization.
Anticipation
Anticipating change can only happen when you continuously scan the internal organization for signs of change, indications of growth, downsizing, outsourcing, mergers or acquisitions, and the external talent market so that you have a sense of what economic trends are occurring and how other organizations are reacting to changes in the market.
Leaders must thoroughly understand their supply chain and current employees’ capabilities and skills to anticipate challenges. This means they will need to research who is in the local talent market and who is in an extended, global market. And, they will need to know what skills already exist inside the firm.
They will need to use candidate relationship management tools to build and maintain a wide range of relationships with diverse candidates to tap the talent they need, whether contract, part-time, or permanent, as needs arise.
The traffic patterns on the recruiting website will provide valuable information about who is interested in the organization and will offer the opportunity to find out why. Are applications increasing or decreasing, and why is that happening? Patterns may indicate changes in the marketplace that you can explore and learn from.
Scenario or Contingency Planning
Scenarios are carefully crafted stories about the future. They incorporate various ideas and trends about the role of technology, people, structure, and process. They are not predictions but more like hypotheses about possible futures, risks, and opportunities. By creating scenarios and attaching an action plan to each one, you have prepared for whatever the future might throw at you. I wrote a longer article about how to do scenario planning a while ago. You can read that article here.
Employee readiness – Not succession planning
Having a wide range of employees ready for any needs is far better than scrambling to find talent or laying off people whose skills are no longer needed. While we cannot predict that a particular position will be replaced once the incumbent is gone, we can ensure that we have the skills in that position distributed widely among employees at all levels. That way, when needs arise, we can pick the level and mix of skills that make sense.
Internal talent is far more valuable than external. Those who already work for you have intimate knowledge of the organizations and how work gets done, which usually means they are more productive. They are motivated and culturally aligned if they have been with you for a while and, given the proper training or development opportunities, can move into other positions with less loss of productivity. But this requires the recruiting function to be part of the talent team and ensure that anyone with skills gets placed inside.
Rapid Response
Once a situation occurs, you will need to act quickly. Whether you need to add staff or reduce, your job may be to find the right external candidate quickly or find a place within the organization for the laid-off worker.
If there are significant hiring needs, you may need rapid response teams that can attack a talent need aggressively using the data you have collected through your market research and CRM.
If you need to make internal placements or help people find new external positions, you need to activate a plan you have already created in your scenario planing process.
New Look at Jobs
The concept of a job or a position that contains a more or less static set of skills and competencies will not hold up much longer. While most organizations need broad categories of work performed – mechanical engineering, database administration, and customer service representation, for example –the skills and the duties performed can be remarkably different from organization to organization, even within the organization, and vary over time. One of the attractions of using the broader talent ecosystem is the ability to change needs quickly without layoffs or massive hiring. More internal staff can be used by re-looking at job descriptions and titles and by building flexibility around the skills required to get a piece of work done, and a broader slice of external candidates can qualify. By keeping jobs narrowly defined, we limit our ability to hire quickly and the potential for creativity and change.
It is time for new approaches to people planning at all levels of the organization, but perhaps it can be driven by the recruiting folks on the frontline of talent.
Consider Upgrading to a Paid Subscription
I cover all the costs of this blog myself.
You can help me immensely by paying for a subscription.
Occasionally, I publish something just for paid subscribers – a white paper, report, or podcast – I try to do two or three of these each year.
ARTICLES OLDER THAN 2 WEEKS ARE AVAILABLE ONLY TO PAID SUBSCRIBERS.
SPECIAL FOR THE MONTH OF FEBRUARY ONLY, AN ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION IS ONLY $30.
Thanks for considering this.
Notes
Also, link to the 15,000 professionals that follow Kevin on LinkedIn.
Join our Twitter feed at @FutureOfTalent
Recent Comments