All over the world, financial services firms are sacking workers. An International Labor Organisation (ILO) report says there were 325,000 layoffs around the world between August 2007 and 12 February 2009, and still it's continuing. The ILO says we are likely to see a permanent reduction in the financial services workforce. And of course, when the layoffs come, you send in the human resources department.

That's what caught my eye when I read this CFO.com report warning chief financial officers not to trust their HR people. According to human resources professor Richard Beatty from rutgers university, HR people have it around the wrong way. Most companies spend too little time and money attracting and retaining top talent, and too much on keeping the rest of the workforce happy, a particularly salient point when businesses are under pressure and morale is low.

Beatty has a point. Part of the problem is that most HR people just aren't strategic. They're not that smart. Think of the best and brightest at university. How many of them went into HR? The best thing companies can do is bring non-HR business specialists to work alongside HR people, maybe even hand the department over to non-HR people. It would be interesting to see how many companies do that.