HR PLANNING : Responsibility in not overhiring

Many people, including seasoned HR practitioners, have erroneously thought of HR planning as simply a process of continuous head counts, leading to periodic redundancy and recruitment exercises.As you scan the environment, seeking information about the demand and supply of labor now and in future, you are actually shouldering a terrible responsibility. I said terrible because a misjudgment on your part could either cause losses for your organization or many colleagues to lose their jobs.Sadly,many managers have this tendency to hire indiscriminately, especially when their business is doing well.But should the economy take a turn for the worse, they would start cutting wages and then firing workers without compunction. That would be a most irresponsible act since everyone would be left so demoralized that they could no longer work with any enthusiasm. I recently admonished one CEO who was "restructuring" the polite term for depriving people of their jobs in his company.No, I have nothing against retrenching people whose jobs have become redundant. What I am against is their being hired without much planning in the first place because I remembered having had cautioned that CEO two years ago when he went on a hiring spree.