The Human Capital Map as a Tool for Employees Replacement after Firms’ Crisis

The paper is based on the theoretical assumption that workers redundancies may be conceptualized not only as a threat but also as an opportunity. This, at least, when the set of human capital (see, among others, Friedman & Kuznets, 1945; Mincer, 1958; Schultz, 1961; Becker, 1962, 1964, 1965) owned by the job losers can be useful for other companies operating in the same or in a different industry. Based on such approach, a methodology is proposed to investigate the human capital associated with the permanence in a specific organizational position and verify the presence of similarities when compared with others job positions. The proposed methodology was applied to a set of 35 companies operating in Abruzzo, a region in Central Italy dramatically hit by job losses in the recent years. Based on a data bank of 1.515 job positions, 179 aggregated job positions – that is organizational positions which are similar at least in two companies – were found. The result seems to confirm the possibility of inter-company – and, sometimes, also inter-industry – mobility in the case of economic crisis with consequent loss of jobs.