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[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

on Tue, Mar 06, 2001 at 09:49:20PM -0500, saundrakaerubel.com wrote:
> Even as the nation faces an economic slowdown, the company, founded in late 
> 1999, sees tremendous potential in the market, and so do research firms 
> like Gartner. "Enterprises that scorn the rehiring model will limit their 
> ability to respond to enterprise needs and unwittingly fuel the success of 
> competitors for knowledge, experience and talent," Gartner said in a 
> research paper issued on the topic last year.

Hm.

> A way to maintain healthy relations with outgoing talent is to keep the 
> lines of communications open by doing such things as sending former 
> employees e-mail notices about new job opportunities as they become 
> available, according to Gartner. That's particularly important in a 
> business climate in which all too often an employee leaves to take a job at 
> a dot-com that a short time later goes belly-up. After dealing with the 
> disappointment, many workers return to their previous jobs.

Oh, okay. I can see this, maybe. (How many workers do you know who quit
to go entrepreneurial and then went back to the same job afterward?)
 
> Larger companies, according to Gartner, would do well to create more formal 
> relationships with past employees by forming alumni associations.

Aha! Great idea! We had one at imonics, of sorts. Of course, it lasted
longer than the company did.
 
> Many employees understand that today's economic realities are forcing 
> executives to lay off workers. Letting them use computers, phones, and 
> faxes for their job search also will go a long way in making sure the 
> relationship ends on a more positive note.

Right! To say nothing of an office or cubicle, chair, and various other
support materials - just as long as you don't have to pay them anything,
it's a great deal for you, because then the company doesn't have to pay
unemployment, health insurance, or other benefits, either.

> "These are companies that know very well how difficult it was to recruit, 
> locate, and attract talent in the last few years," Sertoglu said. "If you 
> do not maintain a relationship with these people, you're basically taking 
> all that effort and throwing it away."

Um, yes. That's essentially what a layoff is, IIRC.
 
> If you do, however, the payoff will be great. You get to promote your 
> corporate brand with these groups of people who already have an affinity 
> toward your organization. Not only will some come back to work for you in 
> the future, but they also are likely to refer other qualified candidates to 
> your company.

s/have/had, before you laid them off,/

So, in a nutshell, companies should feel fine about laying off their
own people when the going gets rough, but keep on good terms with them
so that when the poor laid off employees' dotcom bombs, the company
that couldn't pay them in the first place can hire them back cheap?

Speaking as someone who was forced by economic adversity to "liberate"
eleven of my twelve team members back in 1996, and then asked less
than a month after the second round whether I could maybe, possibly
hire them all back, I can only *laugh* at this whole idea.

Am I the only one who thinks this is insulting, demoralizing, and 
beyond the realm of decency?

Maybe it's just me. But this strikes me as an absurdly cynical
strategy for any company, and as a sign of how little respect
employees /or/ companies have for one another.

-- 
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