From Human Beings to LDAP entries

Nowadays tendency when companies merge or there is a take over operation and the resulting body reaches a critical mass of employees, the human side of the company which usually held HR or a similar body is gradually lost. A company's goal is to make money, but also save operating money to reduce cost; both help increasing share holders dividend if the company is listed. The merging or buying helps to reduce cost of operating, to gain in competitivity. So if you have X HR employees in the first company and Y HR employees in the second one, the resulting company would most certainly not have X+Y HR employees because higher management will most probably say the work is been replicated. Usually the HR force will be reduced by 10 to 30% because the baseline of work can be handled by a reduced number of employees and many tasks are run through processes, therefore can be "automatized".
There is one factor the you consequently loose: the factor that makes the company "human". It is when the employee feels like he's not a number, that the HR representatives looks at him as original, and not through a series of processes and ticking boxes. That factor exists because of a silent work generally not traçable and unseen in reports, statistics and other weapons used by high management to measure the value added of an HR employee, which is actually taking up to 30% of the HR body's time. As opposed to Marketing/sales where you pay more attention to this human side, because down the line it generates revenue. Reduced HR team will do the same work that is within their job description. The issue is that the human side is rarely part of it as you have to generate or save something traçable immediately (e.g. revenue), not happiness and well being. The energy consumed to do their extended work within the newly generated company is energy they do not spend anymore in perfecting the "human" side of the company.

That's when employees become LDAP entries: their past is forgotten, what matters is the present work they are doing and the prospect of what they can give to the company in the future. Hence, a young professional will be seen as more attractive as the past (the experience) is not taken into account in the new calculations, only the present which is ok (almost a cheap labor with great expectations). An experienced an old professional within the company is at loss because all that he has done is not taken into account, he currently works good but he is expensive and the prospect is short as he has few years left before retirement. Within this line of thoughts a natural reaction is to try to retire him, and maybe re-employ him as a consultant (less expensive and easily disposable) if the market allows it. Sometimes the limit is pushed up to considering out employees in the wrong place at the wrong time (e.g. location in a downturn, employee between assignments and a HR department with strict orders of headcount reduction). 

With the globalization, it becomes impossible to mix workload with emotions within a company that reached a critical mass of employee, because that company does mix only with numbers.