Finding ways to fire senior staff, hire new

The economic slowdown may have left scores of people with less to do, but it is paradoxically increasing the workload of some others.

Those who stand on either side of the job hunt—human resource professionals and headhunters—are finding their hands full.

While HR professionals are being forced to come up with creative ways to let go of senior staff, recruitment experts are having a tough time coping with the flood of resumes from candidates hounding them for the few openings that come up at the higher level.

For many headhunters, it’s literally sleepless nights taking calls from jobseekers, or email in-boxes clogged with CVs, from senior management executives for whom the dream of relentlessly rising salaries of the past few years year has become a nightmare this year.

“With the crisis deepening, organisations have also had to lay off perfectly well qualified people at senior levels. Going forward, only the best will survive,” says Arun Das Mahapatra, managing partner at executive search firm Heidrick and Struggles.

Thousands of executives from the so-called C-suite (CFO, CMO, CTO etc) are on the hunt, reaching out to friends and former colleagues, turning pages of their rolodex and most importantly, hounding headhunters.

“The number of senior executives seeking jobs these days has gone up exponentially,” says R Suresh, CEO of Stanton Chase, a multinational executive search firm.

Unfortunately, new job creation is not keeping pace.

As India Inc copes with a slowdown that is widely expected to cut the rate of economic growth to around 6% this year compared with the 9%-plus average growth seen between 2004/05 and 2007/08, growth plans at most companies are completely scrapped or in deep freeze.

Headhunters speak of scores of senior executives who have been shown the door, but say many more are on the fence frantically searching for jobs, watching the notice period served on them by their existing employers tick by.

Senior executives in companies such as Goldman Sachs, Citibank, Merrill Lynch, American Express and Nomura are among the worst hit, victims of the employee cull taking place wordwide in the banking and financial services sectors.

Other sectors where senior executives have been hit hard include retail, real estate, media, manufacturing, IT and consumer goods.

“There are an unprecedented number of senior professionals, both here and offshore, who have been caught on the wrong foot, and are currently having to evaluate alternative employment options,” says Sonal Agrawal, CEO of Accord, a leading headhunting firm.

“Never before have we had so many well qualified, experienced managers with successful track records reaching out to us. Unfortunately, we have relatively fewer opportunities to show them.”

The desperation levels are rising. Headhunters say they are besieged with calls from candidates who want a job at any cost, with some candidates even willing to even take a 25-30% cut in fixed salaries.

Gone is the habitual job-hopping of the boom times. Also gone are the days of bonuses — sign-on and staying on — and fixed performance incentives.