If you find yourself in the potentially frightening position of
losing your job, don't worry. There is an enormous recruitment
industry out there, waiting for your CV. And you may find that your
talents are better appreciated elsewhere. Madeleine Glover
reports
You've lost your job. Shock, horror. As the knowledge sinks in,
your stomach churns and your brain goes into overdrive. How are you
going to pay the mortgage and the credit card bills? How can you
afford to eat? Well, relax. There are lots of things you can do,
according to the readiness of your company to help, your contract
and your attractiveness to new employers. And there is an enormous
recruitment industry out there, ready and waiting for your CV to
get you your next job.
Losing a job is being faced by hundreds, if not thousands, of
people who were employed by the dot coms that have gone bust. There
are also huge corporates, such as Compaq and Nortel, making
thousands of workers redundant in the US and elsewhere. European
employees of these companies are wondering whether they are going
to be in the same boat.
Reassuringly, companies such as Nortel have systems in place to
help workers made redundant. "We will look for opportunities for
redeployment within the organisation," claims a Nortel spokeswoman.
"We have very well developed talent management resources and
redeployment counselling schemes. We [also] have an internal jobs
market using on-line intranet channels."
Some employers, such as ICL, keep an eye on the constantly changing
demands made by their business and the skills needed to do the
various jobs in the organisation and make sure their employees are
kept in touch with any adjustments that need to be made in
advance.
Accent on redeployment
Support units within the company
employ dedicated managers to look at individual skills and
performance to allow employees affected by redundancy the
opportunity to top up skills or change direction. If redundancies
do need to be made, the accent again is on redeployment within the
company.
"From the company's point of view, it is more cost-effective to
redeploy," says
Deirdre Murphy, group employment manager at ICL.
The company offers employees access to internal and external job
searches and gives guidance on how to network CVs. Career
counselling and interview improvement techniques are also made
available. "We allow employees to take time out, ask what do they
want to be doing for the future. They can then work with managers
to help them through that," says Murphy.
Another option for those employees of 50 and above is early
retirement, which is open to any employee. "This depends on each
individual circumstance," explains Murphy. But age is not the
criterion, the emphasis is on what each individual has to offer and
how that contribution can be enhanced both for the company and for
the employee.
So there is considerable scope for the company to help employees
who have lost their job. The contract you were given is also an
important factor. All employees are protected from unfair dismissal
by the law after one year's service, and can take employers to
tribunals if they want to.
Some do, but what has to be remembered here is whether you can get
another job afterwards. Employers might be reluctant to give
references to an employee who has taken them to a tribunal. This
situation can also give an employee leverage: offering to settle a
dispute with an award of cash without going to a tribunal.
"You will often get situations where the employer doesn't want to
go through the whole process that would make the dismissal fair, he
wants to get shot of it quickly," says Elizabeth Slattery, a lawyer
specialising in employment law at Lovells. "Then you would often
find that there might be a negotiation, but it is still going to be
around what the likely compensation is that you would get if you
had to go to a tribunal."
Tribunals can award sums of money up to the statutory limit for
compensation, which is £51,700. They can also make a basic award
calculated by reference to an individual's age and length of
service, but that sum is capped at £240 a week.
Awards vs rewards
Tribunals can order employers to reinstate employees and if the
employer refuses, then the tribunal can make an additional award -
usually between 13 and 26 weeks' pay - but then again it is subject
to the £240 a week limit. These sums of money are quite small in
comparison to the rewards that could be waiting in a new job.
Moreover, the time and energy spent on going through a tribunal
could be better employed looking for a new job.
"Particularly for a reasonably well-paid individual, you can
imagine that £51,000-odd doesn't go very far, especially when you
are thinking about things like missing out on bonus scheme
payments," says Slattery. This is particularly so of Save As You
Earn schemes. "I have certainly seen one tribunal where the whole
of the £50,000 was assessed as being purely referable to the loss
on the SAYE schemes," she says.
Notice periods connected to contracts are important too. If an
employee leaves a company without working the notice period, there
is a loss to the employee which a tribunal award might not be able
to match.
"If they have got a long notice period, then what is the loss under
the contract?", asks Slattery. "If someone has got a 12-month
notice period and they are earning £100,000 a year, then obviously
you can soon reach a calculation which is significantly more than a
tribunal would have the jurisdiction to award."
Currently, says Slattery, employees have two possibilities when
made redundant. One is entitlement to a statutory redundancy
payment, again in very low limits, calculated in the same way as
the basic award for a tribunal, which is age and length of service
multiplied by a week's pay, capped to the £240 a week limit, and to
a maximum of 30 weeks.
Second, they can claim that their dismissal was unfair, especially
in the situation where one company is taken over by another.
"Employees might still be able to say there was a redundancy
situation, there was a need to reduce the numbers, but you went
about the selection in an unfair way, so you could claim unfair
dismissal," says Slattery.
But the pressure on employers to make awards isn't only limited to
the law - they have their public image to think of as well as their
relationship with their clients. The reason why employers prefer to
redeploy workers rather than make them redundant is precisely
because it is costly for them, both in monetary terms and the cost
to their reputation.
"I think more and more you will see that employers will have a
scheme that is more generous than statutory. In a way, that is
where the consultation process becomes quite important," argues
Slattery.
European spotlight
People on short-term contracts are
also protected by law, but only after one year's employment, or two
consecutive six-month contracts. But a non-renewable contract can
be classified as a dismissal and therefore deemed unfair. This
whole area is being put under the spotlight of European law.
A European directive is saying that employers should not be able to
discriminate against short-term contract workers just because they
are on short-term contracts. This may deter employers from offering
these contracts in future, which is a shame, as it curtails the
freedom of the employee to move around.
However, in the information technology industry, both in sales and
on the technical side, employees take some pride in being able to
negotiate their own deals. "We have 500-600 candidates a week for
senior sales and senior management on our site," says Paul Smith,
CEO of FirstPerson Global, the on-line technology recruitment arm
of Harvey Nash, the executive search company. "Seventy-five per
cent want to find out what makes companies tick, what jobs are out
there and what their peers are earning, and a lot of them are
looking for staff and want to understand what is attractive."
Recruitment companies are matching candidates, some of whom have
been made redundant, "at a rate of 20 a week", according to Graham
Williams, regional director of Hays IT. Emma Robinson, recruitment
manager at Hays Interactive, reports an increase in technical
consultants, producers and designers looking for work after the dot
com crash. "We are able to place them," she claims.
Pauline Cox of Hi-Calibre Personnel reports that it is more
difficult to place employees with Windows NT skills and Web
designers because of the downturn, but employees qualified in UNIX
are still extremely sought after, and so are good sales people.
"Good sales people are still very hard to find and so are marketing
people. I think business and sales are still booming," she
says.
So, if you've just lost your job, take heart. There's a big world
out there waiting to hear from you.