A Love Letter to Talent Teams | We love you, we need you and we want you to stay

It feels like early 2020 all over again for the Talent world.

My newsfeed on Linkedin is clogged with updates from internal Talent Professionals who have been made redundant along with vast swathes of their team, many within Big Tech. The tech sector has already experienced a substantial number of job cuts in 2023, with Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Salesforce, Dell, IBM, SAP, Paypal, Wayfair, and Vacasa each reporting workforce reductions.

In fact, three of the largest individual rounds of layoffs since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic were reported in January. According to layoffs.fyi , which has tracked tech layoffs globally since the pandemic, more than 150,000 people were laid off in 2022, across more than 1,000 tech companies.?

I’ve seen a couple where it seems like it was the WHOLE Talent team that has been axed!?

Working in the Talent space, this obviously sucks. Through both our RPO and Agency, we work with Internal Talent teams on a daily basis. They are awesome. They do crucial work that is often STILL not recognised. Companies are not organic things, if there are no people, or if you are bringing in bad people, there is no company! Talent teams are literally the lifeblood of any successful organisation.

Unfortunately, in tough economic times, Talent teams are often the first to face cuts. Despite their crucial role in ensuring a company's success, their value is often not fully understood and their existence may be questioned when hiring plans are reduced.?

“If we are not hiring, why do we need this team?”

However, it's important to consider retaining as much of the Talent team as possible for the following reasons (aside from the fact they are usually the best team in the building):

1) Hiring never stops: So, maybe right now you have cut your hiring plans to zero for the year. Or maybe you are unfortunately having to make cuts. No need for Talent then. Except people are never static - your staff will come and go. At the very best, every company will need to replace some people due to natural churn. When that happens, have you got the internal resources to work on that? If you don’t, you will probably end up hiring at a slower rate as you won’t have a specialist on the case, and you’ll end up spending more on recruiter fees (I’m arguing against myself here I know but it's true!)

2) And what happens when things turn around? Even worse when things suddenly turn around then, who is going to handle this?

This is something we saw time and time again at the end of 2020. So many companies had got rid of most, if not all, of their talent teams. And then it was panic stations as they had no one to hire for the surge again! Hiring a brand new talent team was too slow. And besides everyone was doing it so it was impossible to find good talent people quickly. And so the spend on external agencies/RPO’s increased massively. Having no one cost time (hiring was slower) and money

3) They don’t just do Talent. Unless you’re at a huge company like Google, most talent teams we deal with rarely just do talent. They will work on everything from making sure your recruitment processes are awesome to your recruitment branding, to ensure you can attract the best people ahead of your competitors.?

Unless you have a big People/HR team who can take this over, these projects fall by the wayside and will long-term affect your recruitment brand and efficiency. If you have a hiring slowdown it is a GREAT time to get your talent team to work on improving how you do recruitment and talent which will only benefit you in the long run.

These people do an amazing job for their companies - and they do a job that is often not recognised. I still don’t understand how many organisations don’t realise something very fundamental - if there are no people, there is literally no company! And it's Talent and People delivering you those people.?

So this is obviously a pretty black-and-white review of things. Life is always a bit greyer than this! Many companies do recognise how awesome their talent team is. Many are doing everything they can to keep them. And many companies have grown them too fast.?

But many don’t. And when they don’t, what seems like an obvious choice is medium to long term, not a great idea. Cutting your talent team too deep will cost your company time and money and also will affect if you can attract the best people.

So please please show some love to your talent team! It is Valentine's Day after all.