The Bill Comes Later

Redundancy decisions are usually measured with care on the way out, however sometimes there is less attention to the costs which arise later, when the same organisation starts hiring again, often for similar roles, into a market that has been watching.

You save on the way out and pay on the way back in

In our research, nearly three-quarters of HR directors who track the numbers say rehiring works out more expensive than the redundancies that came before it. Employers save in the moment and pay later. And they pay more if their brand has taken a knock along the way, because a weaker reputation makes every future hire slower and harder to land.

A weaker brand makes every hire dearer

The external evidence points the same way. The Recruitment & Employment Confederation estimates that a poor hire at mid-manager level can cost a business more than £132,000 once training, lost productivity and re-recruitment are counted.

Rebuilding teams on a damaged brand means making those expensive bets more often, because the strongest candidates have more questions, more choices, and longer memories than they used to.

The authenticity trap

When employees feel their employer brand reflects the reality of working there, advocacy is strongly positive. When they feel it does not, it falls heavily into negative territory. Badly handled exits widen the gap between the story you want to tell and the experience people actually have, and that gap can quietly undermine your next recruitment campaign before it begins.

Nearly two-thirds of the UK white-collar workers we surveyed agree that getting redundancies wrong damages an employer's reputation. The exit has become part of the brand, whether you manage it or not.

Measure it before you need to

The point is not to avoid restructuring, it is to stop treating reputation as the one variable you leave unmeasured. Knowing where your employer brand stands, before, during and after change, is what turns a hidden cost into a managed one. It is far cheaper to understand the gap between your story and your reality now than to discover it in a recruitment campaign that will not convert.

Read the evidence in full. Download the report: When the Music Stops for the complete picture on how restructuring shapes your employer brand.

LHH's employer brand offering brings together the team formerly known as Stafford Long, the award-winning employer branding agency that became part of LHH in 2025. For more than 35 years we have helped organisations understand and strengthen how they show up as an employer, from employer brand research and health audits to recruitment marketing and creative campaigns. If you are looking for an employer brand agency to support you through change or growth, we would be glad to talk.

Learn more about employer branding at LHH.

 

Sources: LHH UK Employee Survey, 2026 (1,260 UK employees). The Mobility Breakdown, LHH, 2026: 500 UK HR directors / heads of HR development at organisations with 500+ employees. Recruitment & Employment Confederation, 'Perfect match: making the right hire and the cost of getting it wrong'.