For Dan Kaplan, senior client partner at CHRO Practice, that means chief human resource officers identifying their leading performers and deciding what are the most crucial roles for the company. “Both involve finding out which employees have the leadership traits the firm needs, which have high levels of learning agility, which are most gifted at problem-solving and which possess the technical or market skills for where the company is going rather than where the company has been in the past,” Kaplan says.
Arbitrary layoffs where HR makes cuts across different locations or business divisions may lead to employers letting go of talent that can best help them in the future. Savvy leaders, instead, are being “strategic and ahead of the curve, asking themselves if they really know who their top-performing employees are, where they are located and which have the future skills that their company requires to thrive coming out of the recession,” says Bradford Frank, senior client partner in Korn Ferry’s Technology Practice.