Every day newspaper headlines spell out increasing economic uncertainty. Commentators predict a recession one day, redundancies are announced the next, and the term, 'credit crunch', last month made it into the 11th edition of The Chambers Dictionary.
No industry sector has been unaffected by this downturn. Back in March Charles Cotton, reward and employment conditions adviser at the CIPD, said: "If HR is not being seen as strategic and an integral part of the business, it could be the first to get canned in an organisation."
So what is the job situation for HR professionals in the immediate future? Cotton says: "It's getting serious but HR departments will probably have to sort out other redundancies in their organisation before they too are affected."
He believes it depends on "organisations' attitudes, meaning each HR department will be treated differently". However, recent research from recruitment company Badenoch & Clarke shows 56% of HR personnel are less confident about their career prospects now than they were at the start of the year - and this is more than in any other industry sector. Sainsbury's, for example, has cut the number of store personnel managers from 850 to 500, meaning 350 staff lost their jobs.
Stuart Thomas, head of recruitment at consultancy Tomdunn, has 20 years' experience working in senior HR roles. He says: "In the short term employers who need to save costs can do away with inward-facing functions like HR. So offshoring and outsourcing is increasing. Employers can also save National Insurance contributions by employing interim staff. If I was an MD looking at my costs right now, and the survival of my business was threatened, I would consider making redundancies in the HR department."
Heidi Waddington, managing director of human resources at Hays, believes most employers will take a longer term view of the crisis and minimise HR redundancies. She explains: "Most are approaching the current economic uncertainty from a long-term perspective and, as such, we haven't seen any dramatic job cuts for HR professionals. Apart from the sectors that have been most affected by the credit crunch - investment banking and house-building - most companies have invested heavily in recruitment strategies in recent years and are reluctant to walk away from that investment now."
But in the same way that news headlines give mixed messages about the likelihood of recession, HR recruitment experts disagree about what is going to happen in the industry in the future. The only thing that is for sure is that the economic outlook is uncertain.
Traditionally, HR is the department that has to deal with redundancies and now it has become vulnerable itself. Mindful of the HR role, Michael Moran, chief executive of Fairplace, offers a glimmer of hope: "If there are redundancies in a company, it is HR who will be there to switch off the lights before they too leave."
