By Rob Gray, Monday 10 June 2019
Commenting on the impact of TUPE:
“Freedom of choice is taken away from the candidate, so although it is protecting some rights, it is taking away others,” notes Harrison Scott joint managing director George Thompson. “Someone could perhaps be transferred to a company they don’t want to work for or have worked for in the past and have had a bad experience with.”
As we know, when big switches do occur it can be devastating for the company that loses out. When businesses struggle or collapse as a result, they make headlines. And in the jobs market, candidates are well aware of this.
“We have found that in recent years, high on the list of candidates’ biggest concerns is job security, whereas in the past the focal point was salary and career prospects,” says Harrison Scott’s Thompson. “Gaining information about largest contracts is now high on the list of questions when handling vacancies with new clients.
“Providing candidates with this information puts their mind at ease in relation to job security concerns. Candidates are much more wary than they used to be when headhunted for a new opportunity, as they are much more aware of the impact these contracts can have on their livelihoods.”
Thompson adds that a wise man once told him that maths can be applied to everything in life, particularly in business. Certainly, there is the well-known risk formula: risk = probability x loss.
“I am no mathematician,” says Thompson, “however I wonder if someone has worked out that if a company is X T/O and wins a contract that is Y, equalling 10/20/30% of their business, then if the contract is lost, how much it would jeopardise the stability of the company?
“There must be some theory to determine that if a company was a certain size and they set out to acquire a contract that was as much as 30% of their business, they would have to implement a plan B to aggressively expand their company to make the overall size of the business much higher in order that what was originally 30% of the business, in a higher turnover company is diluted to 15% or 10%.”
Sounds prudent. And if a prominent academic hasn’t already devised a theory along these lines…ladies and gentlemen, we give you Thompson’s Law. “