Battling The Hiring-Firing Conundrum

Over the course of 2024, Indian employers announced more than 130,000 job cuts. Meanwhile, a Teamlease report highlighted that the skill gap in India is expected to reach 30-32 million by FY25.

The process of hiring and firing are not mutually exclusive in the businesses, unlike the popular mindset is. One of the simplest scenarios could be that companies hire when they are expanding and fire when they are under pressure. However, it runs deeper than that. Letting go of positions that involve repeat-tasks, while creating newer and more strategic roles that need skills which can’t be automated has been the top trend for 2024. This pattern of redundancy-recruitment is common because organizations till now have focused only on vertical growth, rather than horizontal growth of the employees, thereby getting into the trap where the organization has roles which aren’t scalable. 

So, where does the solution lie? The right solution or nearly accurate approach for hiring and firing is to reskill the right way. While reskilling comes with its own set of challenges, what is equally important is to manage the disruption created within the organization by such movements and communicate it effectively.

Recruit or reskill? 
Reskilling is one of the most sophisticated approaches to tackle multiple employee-centric issues all at once. From an organization standpoint, ongoing reskilling efforts ensure that you are better positioned to handle volatile market situations. An organization which tends to reskill, cross-skill the workforce from time to time can avoid layoffs by absorbing people internally and maintain organizational equilibrium. Similarly, from an employee standpoint, a person who is already part of a team has a higher tendency to continue with the team if given the chance to learn new skills and work on a new role. In an individual capacity, the employee gains more skills, gradually readying him for vertical growth opportunities as well.

The Challenges 
Similar to the hiring process and layoffs, reskilling also has its own set of challenges. In the hiring process, a candidate may be aware of the job role, however the organization’s culture and ethos remain new to him. On the contrary, in a reskilling process, candidates are well equipped with the company ethos, culture, team values and bonding within the team, however the job profile remains new to him. Other challenges include:
⦁    Perception management: Creating acceptance in the candidate for a role not done before and providing him with the confidence to try something new remains one of the biggest functions for employers. Candidates tend to find loopholes on why a certain role or position will not work for them, in order to protect their comfort zone. At such a point, it is essential to help candidates envision how their career continues to grow, with the newly acquired skills. Setting right expectations and preparing them for a new team and new responsibilities need to be dealt with utmost attention, maturity and EQ. 
⦁    Resistance to change: Resistance towards a change continues to be a challenge across horizons. Be it the candidate being mandated to acquire new skills or the manager/team mandated to accommodate candidates who have no prior experience in the role they are being placed into, resistance is natural. The HR function needs to carefully navigate these issues and prepare both the candidate and the team for certain friction for initial weeks of deployment. 
⦁    Absorbing candidates into different Roles: Reskilling, in order to avoid layoffs, can present a significant challenge for HR function to create new job roles. If a product or technology is no longer required, and a taskforce of 50 people were to be redeployed, it is the role of the HR function to ensure that while these employees are working in their current role, they also acquired skills that can now help them in their new roles and positions for them. 
⦁    Mandatory On-job training: While the L&D team can help in equipping the candidates with basic skills and knowledge of the new role, nothing beats the on-the-job training. The stage of re-skilling can be done seamlessly if there is appropriate support from line managers and team members. Lack of timely interventions and regular check-ins may lead to unsettled employees and unsatisfied managers, both of which are not healthy for any organization. Therefore, consistent follow-ups (weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly catchups) can help in such cases.

The way forward: 
Gone are the times when monetary and promotions were the only benchmarks for joining a company. Today, the candidates are looking at their 360-degree growth and expect such policies from the organization. These expectations come at a time where none of the companies are prone to layoffs or protect roles that may become redundant after a certain period. Amidst this, reskilling and continuous cross-skilling is the only viable option to navigate the hiring-firing conundrum successfully.

At IndiaMART, we follow a rotation policy as part of employee growth and L&D, under which the workforce is rotated regularly within the teams and departments. For instance, new sales division employees are moved into client servicing and client servicing are moved into key client divisions after a certain period of time. This not only helps in ensuring that a candidate's growth is never stagnant but also prepares him for multiple roles in the same company. When needed, these people can be deployed into different roles and can be given more than one portfolio to lead. The same policy is applicable at manager level as well, thus ensuring that managers continue to lead newer people within the teams.

Today, reskilling has to be a part of an organization’s DNA. As part of organizational policies, reskilling helps in tuning the employee mindset in a positive way, imbibe the spirit of job security in them and create a sense of loyalty and trust towards the organisation.

(The article has been written exclusively for BW People publication by Madhup Agrawal, National Head- HR, IndiaMART InterMESH Limited)