Restructuring done right in Vietnam: redeploy before you rehire

Redeployment means checking, before you make a role redundant, whether the skills you are about to release match skills you are about to hire. In Vietnam's tight market that check pays twice over, because the person you exit this year is often the person you rehire at a premium next year.

Most restructures are planned as a subtraction: which roles go, how much it saves, how fast. LHH's redeployment case study shows how the organisations getting the most from workforce change treat redeployment as part of the plan, not an afterthought, and in the Vietnamese talent market that argument is unusually strong. Here, the person you make redundant in one part of the business today can be the person you are trying to rehire, at a premium, in another part next year.

The cost that does not show up in the restructure spreadsheet

A restructure is easy to model as a saving because the cost it avoids is invisible. When a business cuts a capable person in one division while a different division is quietly hiring for adjacent skills, it pays twice: once in the exit, and again in the search, the premium and the ramp-up to replace what it just let walk out. In a tight market for skilled people in Vietnam, that second cost is rising, and it rarely appears in the paper that justified the restructure. Redeployment is simply the discipline of checking, before you cut, whether the capability you are about to lose is capability you will shortly need.

What redeployment looks like in practice

Redeployment is not a promise to save everyone; it is a deliberate step in the plan. It means mapping the skills you are about to release against the skills you are about to hire for, and giving people a real, supported route to move where a match exists, including the reskilling to close a gap that is small enough to close. Done well, it keeps critical capability inside the organisation, reduces the number of exits you have to manage, and sends a signal to the people who stay that the business changes thoughtfully rather than bluntly. Done not at all, it guarantees you will rebuild from outside what you dismantled from inside.

It still has to be a restructure that holds up

Redeployment sits inside the larger discipline of restructuring well, which in Vietnam is as much a relational and reputational exercise as a legal one. The restructures that hold up are planned as communication events, not just legal events: with staff, with unions, and with the labour authorities whose expectations an experienced HR team already knows. That means the structural decisions, the redeployment options, the manager notifications and the support for those who do leave are designed together, as one change, rather than bolted on in sequence. A clean legal process that leaves people feeling discarded still costs the organisation its standing in a connected market.

Where career transition fits

For the roles that genuinely cannot be redeployed, doing right by the people leaving is the other half of restructuring well, and it is a discipline of its own: career transition support built around what each person actually wants next, not a single job-search script. The structural work and the people work are two sides of the same change. An organisation that plans only the first half is usually the one explaining the second half after it has gone wrong.

Put the exit list next to the hiring plan

Before the structural decisions harden, set the roles you are about to release against the roles you are about to open, and count the adjacencies. That count is the honest measure of whether redeployment is real in your case or only a line in the paper, and it is one your own HR team can produce in an afternoon. Where it turns out to be larger than expected, the redeployment options belong in the same plan as the notification and the manager preparation, which is how our restructuring and downsizing advisory is designed to work.

LHH Vietnam has advised through every restructuring cycle this market has had since 1998, for multinationals establishing themselves here and for Vietnamese companies scaling across the region.

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