In May 2020, Frances got a call from her boss informing her she would need to re-apply for the job she currently held. The US-based publication she worked for had lost much of its advertising revenue due to Covid-19, and now restructuring was underway. Redundancies loomed.
“I was a team of one, so my role would either survive, or get cut,” says Frances, now 28. “I had to make a case for my position in a presentation to the publishers, showing how much revenue it could generate and why they should keep it.”
Frances likens what happened next to The Hunger Games (a fictional series where young people in a dystopian universe must compete in a fight to the death). At the request of new bosses who’d come in, she says her colleagues had to join a large group call, then prove why they deserved a role over the others.
Many of them had worked alongside each other for decades and had become friends. A few weeks after her presentation and interview, Frances was told she had been re-appointed in her role, but many colleagues weren’t so fortuitous. “I lost just under half of them, and we were all quite traumatised by having to go through that process,” she says.
As layoffs and restructuring efforts roll on, some companies are taking this approach, having existing employees re-apply for their own positions – asking them to prove their quantifiable worth to the company or lose their jobs. It’s not a brand-new practice, but some experts say this may become more common in current economic conditions.
Many workers who’ve gone through the process say this reality is worrying, as it can take a toll on morale and professional security down the line.
The pressure to re-apply
The process of re-application differs among firms and roles. Often, ‘at risk’ employees – those who are in positions that are targets for redundancies – go through a re-interviewing process. They also may be asked to perform other tasks such as presentations, competency assessments or psychometric testing.
Some workers are learning about this headcount-reduction approach for the first time. But firms across many industries in the private sector have been implementing the practice for decades, says Lesley Rennie, senior employment-law solicitor at the Cheshire, UK-based professional-services platform WorkNest.
She adds it’s hard to know how common this is now, because few businesses are willing to share information and visibility relating to their recruitment processes and restructurings. But Rennie believes there will be an uptick as businesses re-evaluate their organisational structures to maximise productivity and mitigate the impact of economic uncertainty at the cost-of-living crisis.
“Restructuring is a way to ensure that they’re operating in the most efficient fashion and make the most effective use of their people, and it’s something we’re seeing more and more of,” says Rennie. “Those restructurings can include competitive recruitment processes, part of which may be the interviews.”
Good intentions gone wrong
The re-application process is not necessarily meant to be Hunger Games-esque. Rennie says if companies use the practice properly, it can be an equitable way of moving forwards with headcount reductions.
“From the employer’s perspective, they want to ensure they have the best and most suited candidate for the role going forwards; and from the employee’s perspective, there’s an equal footing and look at their ability to perform in the future role, not looking back at performance in a former one,” she says.
Yet even when the practice is done fairly and reasonably under the scrutiny of employment law, some employees say re-application can be arduous and distressing.
Competing against colleagues and – for some workers – interviewing for the first time of years, can be an arduous process (Credit: Getty Images)
When Liz Villani had to interview to save her job, she was shocked. At the time, in the early 2000s, she worked as a manager in the consumer-goods industry in London. She’d progressed rapidly, and was ambitious about her future in the organisation.
“It made me question my abilities. Having your security and beliefs suddenly challenged isn’t easy – I physically lost my voice for 24 hours at one point due to the shock,” says Villani, who was aged 30 at the time.
Twenty years later, she still remembers how differently everyone responded to the re-interviewing process. “It was interesting to see how some used it as a chance to promote themselves, leveraging the opportunity of reinterviewing to impress senior management, while others engaged in gossip and drama,” she says. “It’s a bit like death – it brings out the worst in everyone.”
Brad Harris, professor of management and human resources at HEC Paris, agrees the process of competing against colleagues – and for some workers, interviewing for the first time in years – can be gruelling.
It may also be more stressful by candidates knowing if they’re successful, they will be taking on the work of their departed teammates. “Some people who stay may suffer from a form of ‘survivor syndrome’, whereby they experience tremendous guilt about retaining their job while their colleagues – many of which were probably considered teammates – were let go,” says Harris.
He continues, “The worker that ‘wins’ the tournament, so to speak, will probably feel better than the one that doesn’t, but it is hard to imagine either coming away feeling great about themselves or their organisation.”
He believes firms that take this approach send a message that they haven’t been paying attention to the positive contributions of workers or value them. “Many workers will internalise that in ways that hurt their self-esteem and confidence.”
And although organisations may feel like it was the right decision to use the process in the short term, Harris believes the negative effects will eventually surface and outweigh any upside.
Workers who are successful, he says, may come away feeling damaged, and likely open to leaving for another opportunity. He believes the workers who stay may be less engaged, motivated and likely to contribute new ideas – and “those that leave will speak ill of the process … which will hurt the organisation’s reputation and ability to recruit when circumstances change”.
A normal process going forwards?
Amid continuing economic uncertainties, say experts, more restructures and redundancies may be on the horizon – even for companies that have largely avoided the need to reduce headcount to this point.
“More companies will feel the pinch of higher interest rates and pockets of weakness will widen for a while yet,” says London-based Sandra Horsfield, senior economist at financial-insights company Investec. Indeed, restructuring and insolvency consultancy firms predicted that 2023 would be their busiest year for some time, and employers could be facing tough choices about headcount throughout the next year.
In other words? The practice of asking workers to re-apply for their own positions as part of these changes may endure.
“Cutting multiple jobs down into singular ones seems to be a staple of the layoff process, so I think it’s here to stay,” says Villani, who now runs #BeYourselfAtWork, an organisation that advises large companies on improving their employee-wellness strategies. She believes re-interviewing as part of a redundancy process has become a part of the modern work landscape.
Frances still works at the same company where she successfully re-interviewed for her position, and has even weathered a number of layoffs since. On reflection, she’s glad she went through the experience with others, rather than alone – although it left a sour taste in her mouth.
She says she’d rather leave an organisation than go through the process again. “I worked so hard to get the job and then fought to keep it, which was the strangest feeling,” she explains. “But then once I had it back, this uncertainty had been planted in my head – it definitely bred a culture of fear, which wasn’t there before.”
