Monday 11 August 2008

Re-Think Redundancies

Employers need to retain staff to see out the economic downturn, according to Hull based human resources consultant Rob Coates; The Managing Director of Willerby Hill.

Rob's Comments are supported by a recent study by Deloitte Touche, which concludes that 2008 is the year when there will be more jobs than people to fill them.

Coates claims that staff expertise and skills are needed most during a downturn to see companies through it. He said "Apart from depriving yourself of prized assets that may be vital to weather hard times, you could be delivering competitive advantage to business rivals by letting go high calibre players whose training and development you financed."

"The fact is that, whatever the short to medium-term trends, the UK workforce is aging and shrinking rapidly, with decent staff increasingly aware of their value and far more ambitious. As such, the employment market is more predatory than ever before and businesses should be positioning themselves as top employers in their sector and geographic area so that they attract and retain the best workers."

Yet still it seems that too many companies are taking the knee-jerk reaction of streamlining three vital areas: marketing, training and staff- with the impact of redundancy invariably echoing long after people have departed. As the morale of the surviving staff is then low and they are feeling insecure they then start to seek alternative opportunities – which then in turn leads to more staff losses.

Rob says that even if business is doing well and there doesn't seem to be any plans to make redundancies then communication and transparency are vital in the face of the slowdown. This way everyone knows what's happening around them and they are kept in the picture.

Author:
Chris Crawford is the MD of BD Recruitment, a specialist recruiter for web development jobs, seo jobs and .net developer jobs, based in Manchester, UK.

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