Things don’t always go according to plan. A report in the past few weeks reached my desk of a company getting cute in its handling of a plan to exit existing staff after the business had changed hands.
Things don’t always go according to plan. In the past few weeks a report reached my desk about a company getting cute in its handling of a plan to exit existing staff after the business had changed hands.
Essentially everyone in the company was made to reapply for their jobs and an external recruitment consultant was used to interview and assess each incumbent to work out whether they could stay.
Needless to say, there was quite a few casualties. Why wouldn’t a company embrace the opportunity to weed out the non-performers and get the staff they always wanted?
One of the people that lost their job was involved in a client servicing role, where he worked with seven or eight of the company’s clients and managed their accounts. After being interviewed for the job that he had already held for several years, he was told by the young recruitment consultant that he lacked the competencies to perform in his role.
The problem was, no more than two months earlier this certain individual had received a glowing performance review and received 100 per cent of his performance bonus. Is it just me or do these two sets of facts not quite line up?
Either the company had a lousy performance management system where incompetents were rewarded handsome bonuses or the external recruitment consultant was himself incompetent. Both are reasonably possible.
However in this particular incident, our Lausanne MBA qualified retrenchee was given a fairly loud and clear message from those who might matter most to the company: its clients.
When he informed them that he no longer had a job, nearly all of the companies that he serviced offered him a job. In fact, the clients were so incensed at the prospect of losing him that they got together and offered to work out a consortium arrangement where they all chipped in to keep him servicing them.
Given the overwhelming vote of support that he had received, which also included several other job offers once news hit the streets that he was back on the market, my last report was that he was still considering the options available to him – no doubt enjoying this rather unexpected and unusual boost to his confidence.
