Adobe is cutting a “small number” of recruiters, the company said recently. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) teams, which often fall under the HR department, have been gutted at Twitter and elsewhere.
Shedding HR workers is trickier than a typical corporate cull. For starters, they are intimately familiar with the company’s internal policies and procedures, so the process must be carried out to the letter. Also, the person delivering the bad news is not just some unknown HR rep, but a colleague and perhaps even a friend.
And cutting the HR function too deeply could lead to problems if only a skeleton crew remains when business conditions improve. In some cases, entire HR departments are eliminated, creating a phenomenon where the last remaining member of staff has to lay themselves off.
“It is a different scenario,” said Kelly Yeates, vice president of service operations at Insperity, which handles HR functions for 11,000 North American clients. Harvard Business School professor Sandra Sucher said: “HR is closest to the sausage making.” Job cuts so far this year are the highest since the 2009 financial crisis, according to outplacement agency Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Layoffs took place across all 30 sectors of Challenger tracks, the first time that has happened in a decade — another sign that the culling has spread far beyond technology. HR or recruiting roles have accounted for 28 percent of all layoffs in tech, training provider 365 Data Science found, and postings for general HR jobs have declined 23 percent over the past year, according to Textio, which helps companies remove bias in job posts and performance reviews.
It is not hard to see how companies justify a reduced need for HR representatives. Along with fewer new hires to recruit and show the ropes, cost-conscious organizations are also cutting budgets for workplace programs including diversity, leadership training, and well-being. “I’ve seen more angst among DEI practitioners,” said Ms. Yeates, recalling a conversation where a diversity colleague asked her for help in acquiring new skills as she feared for her job.
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Companies also hired more HR employees than usual during the pandemic given the unprecedented challenges of co-ordinating remote work, rolling out vaccine mandates, and grappling with the surge of resignations.
Last year, organizations employed one full-time HR employee for every 69 employees, according to workplace consultancy Gartner. That compares to a historical norm of 1 to 100. The push to get workers back to the office could also affect HR roles. Meta told employees this week that it would pause all new remote-work applications and requests to transfer to another office through the first half of this year. HR staff would typically handle those requests.
One silver lining for HR professionals is that those who handle compliance and benefits typically stick around. Others can sometimes move to different roles inside the organization. Recruiters, for instance, can make very good salespeople. And some HR workers spend years embedded in support of specific business units, like manufacturing, and learn that business well enough to get hired.
There are also plenty of industries, such as hospitality and health care, that continue to hire and will need workforce expertise. Still, that does not salve the pain and suffering of getting sacked, which can be jarring for those in HR.
Organizations underestimate the depth of disengagement that occurs during a layoff, and with HR, there are two levels of disengagement,” said George Penn, managing vice president at Gartner, who has laid off HR reps and been laid off himself. They are already managing the broader layoff, and now they have additional stress from the effect on their teammates, or, if they are the next to get thrown out, on themselves.
