Why would you cut experienced legacy employees to cut costs? It's completely counterproductive. I'd pay good money for a leadership that realizes that experience is a good thing.
Experience brings in more money than it costs and it will certainly lose you more money than you'll save by replacing those people. You might be paying new people less, but they will cost in training, time taken from other employees to show them how to do something, correcting the mistakes they make...
Of course, those at the top don't see this since they're completely disconnected from how we operate on lover levels. But they do see those small bumps in profit for the first quarter after the layoffs. No matter that they are already gone the following quarter, they got what they wanted, so why should they care?