Freeze the Hire

You get an interview call from your dream company. So you have a bout of food-poisoning, your dog has to be vaccinated, your dead uncle (God bless his soul!) dies again, your mom has a fall and has to be rushed to the doctor and your child’s teacher calls about him getting into a fight in school and you absolutely rush from office- until all the interview rounds are done and successfully so. Salary and notice period negotiations are over and the recruitment face of that company tells you that they are processing your offer. They are just waiting for a couple of approvals!

You are on the top of the world. You start planning your exit conversation with your boss. You start making the handover document.

Today comes and goes. No offer letter hits your inbox. Tomorrow comes and goes. Total silence in your inbox.  You call the recruiter and he tells you something vaguely reassuring. After all, keeping a candidate “warm” is also part of the recruiter’s profile. The next week arrives and passes you by. Nothing. You call the recruiter again and he again tells you something vaguely reassuring. The next week comes and goes with no offer letter in your inbox. You do not call the recruiter. You start wondering. Have they filled the position internally or have they found someone better than you? Your curiosity pushes you to get in touch with a friend who has a friend whose cousin works for your dream company. And the reason comes grape-vining back to you- your dream company has just announced a “Hiring Freeze”.

You sigh in disappointment, but your ego does a joy dance. Nothing is wrong with you. Something is wrong with them.

After all, the expert Investopedia says – A hiring freeze is when an employer temporarily halts non-essential hiring to reduce costs — usually when an organization is under financial duress.

Hiring freeze has been around for ages, the most celebrated weapon for cost control. Not just companies, even governments do it. US president Trump announced a hiring freeze just three days after assuming office.

Your mind goes back to all the times you have seen “Hiring Freeze” in companies you, your friends, your friend’s friends or their cousins have worked in.

That high growth start-up you had worked in had kept hiring, without any attention to productivity, role-consolidation or the learning curve. You had yourself frozen hires just to give yourself some breathing space to take stock and re-adjust your headcount. You remember that conversation with your friend who worked in an MNC which had made huge investments on system standardization and automation. It had frozen hiring for about six months to assess whether its investment made sense. Once, your organization froze hiring because it thought there’s a recession round the corner. It wanted to plan for an impending dip in its growth curve but crazily the sales almost doubled. You were taking a dozen interviews a day and settling for just about average candidates to quickly fill up those positions that were left open during the freeze! When you had a vent out session with your cousin, she said it happens to her twice a year as her employer announces a hiring freeze every alternate quarter to meet the numbers!

Hiring freeze makes great economic and intellectual sense. A few years back, you had a mandate to reduce your team size and you achieved it through a hiring freeze. Not one employee was fired! Not just that, you noticed that your team was activating their grey cells to make their jobs easier. They had become passionate about standardizing and automating their work, so much so that your team won a “Faster and Better” award in the company.

But, whatever said and done, the team morale at that time was not at an all-time high. They were feeling overworked and were forever irritated. Even the “Faster and Better” award did not cheer them up much! You wanted to take them out for a celebratory dinner at your own expense and they were not even interested. They said they had work to do!

Actually, hiring freeze does to managers, what children do to parents. The manager’s patience quotient goes up phenomenally, by learning to tolerate non-performance. The manager clings on to non-performers, hand-holds them, shoulders a lot of their work, gives them pep-talks, smiles through the disasters created by their inefficiency, defends them in front of superiors. The manager is so scared that there will be no replacement if they leave or are asked to go.

You remember that great talent who walked in through your door when the hiring freeze was on and your heart ached as you could not take the person in. Such wrong timing!

Your mind wanders to that single time when you absolutely needed to back fill a position during a Hiring Freeze. Your right-hand guy had quit for the long- term treatment of his special child. The plethora of processes, the wasted time, in getting around these processes to get approval for the hire! The recruiter’s job started after the approval and a good four months got wasted by the time you closed on someone.  You were so worried that your left-hand guy might quit because he was burdened with part of your right-hand guy’s work.

The shrill ring of your desk phone jolts you out of your reverie. “Hiring freeze” effective right now, announces the boss!