HR Trends: Separate
What’s crucial for HR leaders and decision-makers in today’s rapidly evolving job market? Staying ahead in recruitment requires more than just keeping up with trends – it demands strategic adaptation.
The rise of automation, AI-driven processes, and shifting candidate expectations present both opportunities and risks. Trends that are introduced too fast and/or by the wrong department will backfire by e.g. generating additional costs, negative employer branding, losing valuable candidates, longer recruitment processes, low(er) candidate experience, etc.
To help companies avoid these mistakes, we put together a summary of the most important trends along an employee’s life cycle – with their accompanying threats and – where possible – adding relatively simple quick wins – everything backed up with stats and real cases.
This week, we are sharing trends and threats related to Phase #5 out of 5: Separating.
HR Trend #1: Virtual offboarding
In the last four articles in the series “HR trends”, we described trends and threats related to attracting and retaining employees in the company. Regardless of whether you’re an HR professional or an employee, you know how vital it is to recruit, manage and onboard people virtually in the right way.
But laying employees off is just as important. How you treat them at the end of the cooperation leaves a trace for the future and vastly influences your employer branding.
As (almost) all activities were moved online, so was the offboarding. As LinkedIn data from 2021 says, 84% of candidates experienced “negative offboarding”.
What are the potential threats?
Incompetent dismissal of unprepared employees, e.g. via group Zoom, which leads to negative employer branding and a smaller pool of candidates in future recruitment processes.
Some examples of poor virtual offboarding tactics include:
- Stellantis laying off 400 employees through video calls after having instructed them to work remotely that day.
- General Motors informing its employees about the job cuts through email, which lacked any personal engagement.
Security risk associated with poor offboarding processes is one of the top concerns for IT teams today. According to Torii survey from 2021:
- 76% of IT leaders agree or strongly agree that “employee offboarding is a significant security threat.”.
- However, IT specialists claim that most breaches are not malicious but accidental – 67%.
- 86% of survey respondents believe that the security threat landscape has changed due to the shift to remote work.
Solution?
→ Sorry, no quick wins. Select and offer outplacement services to your employees. Train your own HR department. Don’t rush the offboarding process and treat your employees with empathy.
Tip: check our offer of outplacement for companies! Last year, we even crowdfunded outplacement services for those who needed it the most!
→ Follow an employee offboarding checklist (especially for IT security) and keep IT personnel informed of upcoming terminations!
If you’d like to discuss how we could potentially support your organization, feel free to get in touch by email with Zadrozna.Anna@CareerAngels.eu.
