How HR Professionals Can Drive Business Impact Despite a Hiring Freeze

As the COVID-19 pandemic hits the world, it is making a huge impact on the economy of every industry. With the world-wide lockdown and workers being quarantined, companies had to make work-from-home arrangements for their employees, which is not really an option for many organizations. Thus, the administrative operations for such companies went for a toss, urging the need for developing cost-containment strategies. This financial imbalance has pushed some of the companies to resort to hiring freeze as a part of their cost-cutting strategy.

But does a hiring freeze mean that your organization can no longer make progress? Not really. While adopting cost-control measures for business benefit is needed at this hour of the economy, you should also look at the positive aspects and focus on growing your business.

Why is it important to drive businesses even during a hiring freeze?

Allowing a hiring freeze due to the current crisis to hold you back from prospering in your business, just isn’t right. As you miss out on gaining new talent opportunities, you also still lack certain man-power that is important for innovation, productivity, and revenue making. Moreover, if you allow your business to come to a standstill due to hiring freeze, you will gradually impair your brand, making future hiring more difficult.

Thus, developing a business model that aims toward prosperity amidst recession can positively impact your business, helping your organization revive to a normal work environment when the economy swings up. Moreover, it will place your business in a better position as compared to your recent competitors when the hiring pause is over.

Cost-cutting may seem important to save your business from drowning in debts, but if you cannot plan on how to drive business during a hiring freeze, the result can be much worse. An unplanned talent management and acquisition halt can lead to a permanent downfall of your business. Below is a list of suggestions that will allow your business to grow even when you have to compromise on your workforce.

Analyze your organization metrics: 

Track and analyze your organization metrics to see if the hiring freeze will do any good for your cost-cutting plan. This will help you make an estimated analysis of your hiring freeze revenue before you jump into the process. You might think that putting a pause to the company employing process can help you cut costs, which is not always the case. 

If your organization is still in the very early stage of growth, you may not want to discontinue hiring as it can completely stop your business. Instead, you can strategize different job positions that offer comparatively less remuneration, such as an internship or junior positions. Exempting major business growth units from the hiring freeze is a smart way to keep the important sectors undisturbed. You can also consider a temporary pay cut for your employees.

Prioritize positions:

If you do resort to a hiring freeze, plan in advance how and from where to start the process of hiring discontinuation. Try limiting your hiring freeze process only to non-key positions. If the situation eventually calls for a reduction in higher level positions, under which your organization’s success depends, make sure that you fill for those work processes to keep your business running. Failing to do so can lead to substantial revenue loss.

Increase individual productivity: 

Make sure your existing employees understand the need for their cooperation by increasing productivity and efficiency. It is important that you look into the work gap created as a result of the hiring freeze and try to mitigate them by encouraging your employees to work extra hours. You can also plan to transfer your workforce internally as and when needed to achieve your target easily.

Offer incentives: 

You can empower your workforce by adding value to their contributions. Providing your employees with extra payment during an economic crisis may not sound like a feasible plan, but at a time when you have already cut down your potential workforce, you will not want to demotivate your prevailing employees. 

Remember, the future of your business depends on your existing workers, and thus it is important to keep inspiring them with rewards for every extra job done. The cost to do so will be less than what it would cost you to hire new employees. Adding incentives for additional work will encourage your employees to contribute to your business growth.

Maintain transparency: 

If your organization is going through economic uncertainty, you need to make it clear to your employees that you are keeping them in the loop. Before taking decisive action on a hiring freeze, you should make your employees aware of the possibility as the decision will affect their work as well. The impact of a hiring freeze can be massive, and if your workforce is aware of that, it will be easier for them to sink into the consequence of it. 

Transparency around the ongoing situation will create a sense of unity between you and your employees, and they will have more respect for your decision. This will help them understand the urgency of maximizing their efforts, making them more productive and efficient.

Track employee performance: 

If the economic crisis prevails, you may also have to consider recession as a further financial control solution. In such a scenario, try monitoring employee performance. Performance management helps you track and remove low performing employees first so that you can treasure your worthy workforce.

Utilize the free time: 

Since your institutional recruiters no longer have to devote time to sourcing and to interview for recruitment, CFOs can now focus on bigger issues related to organizational growth that had been kept pending for long. Invest time in nurturing existing and valuable skill sets and business insights that can be used in many different ways. 

You can also utilize this time to frame future business strategies to positively impact your business. Also, don’t wait for better days to implement your strategy, because the pressure of catching-up will be too high once industries get back to normal.

It is certain that the economic crisis will make you experience difficult times, and not being able to generate revenue is acceptable, but are you checking the business impacts of hiring freeze? Implementing cost-cutting measures in a way that can completely shatter your company is a big ‘no-no.’ An industry-standard business strategy will help your company overcome the challenges that your organization might be facing as a result of the current hiring freeze.