Hiring and firing during Challenging Times affect enterprises in unforeseen ways at the enterprise operational and individual levels. Hiring processes receive much attention for all of the highly structured, stylized, and scrutinized details. Firing (alternately down-sizing, right-sizing, reductions, and more) sees much less attention and publicly shared learning. The questions are even harder to answer as the number of issues grows hugely and uncontrollably.
This post focuses on the unspoken societal lore and supervisory myths about the RIF process.
We contend that hiring and firing are NOT opposite and symmetrical processes. While a hiring manager might say “I’ll hire this one and they can be developed into a star”, a firing manager rarely says “I’ll fire the star and develop a replacement over time”. Likewise, the hiring manager looking to cover weaknesses and construct a team to some philosophy might say “I’ll hire this one and they can be the backup for a future loss”. A firing manager rarely thinks “They are only the backup for 3-4 other positions and the primaries can do the work” or “We’ll hold on to them because in 3-4 years we’ll need that skillset”.
Hiring managers reflect the time horizons of their enterprise perspectives “We need the skills right away to make next quarter’s numbers” is only rarely matched by “We need a deep overlapping coverage for 5-10 year succession planning”. Firing managers also reflect the time horizons of “We have to be able to cover the five tasks for the next 12 months in case we get no more help.” rather “I’ll keep them so they can train up the others over the next couple years while other layoffs go on”. The differences between hiring and firing managers are so large those without each experience are likely to be wrong about how they choose who can be fired.
The subsequent realization for hiring and firing managers is the optimism and pessimism inherent in each perspective role. The hiring manager has an imagination and expectation that the stream of good candidates will continue to be available and that hiring can be repeated in the future. The firing manager has imagination and expectations ignoring future layoffs, the productivity of left-behind workers, and the frictional-business costs of migrating to the post-layoff work environment. In each instance, the optimism works to choose poorly focused short-term requirements.
The hiring manager expects a new worker to actually exceed with minimal training. The availability of future candidates will be the same or better in the relevant field. Talent skills’ requirements as needed for fast-changing enterprises are often plain wrong. Hiring managers are optimistic that younger, less experienced workers, will have new skills to compensate for the net productivity loss of "expensive" experienced workers. The final optimism is hiring managers expect to be able to “fix the problems”, if any, by hiring more people as needed. Pessimism comes in the form of dread about the capability of recent hires and teams when sales and customer service are functionally transformed.
The firing manager frequently underestimates actual costs to accelerate new employees' ability to “take up the load”. The talent management costs to compensate for additional work over a longer term by remaining workers reduce the cost benefits of RIFs. The firing manager sees the opportunity to reduce training and development costs for a year or two (who would have time anyway?) to squeeze a few gains even after layoffs. The costs of upscaling the skills of the laid-off workers can be used to increase their value as RIFs. The optimism of the firing manager comes from the realization of apparent problems gotten out of their department and teams.
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