Layoffs, restructuring and company closures remain a crisis at the heart of the present context. This turbulent environment has implications for local employment. It is within this context of recent crisis, which threatens jobs and businesses, that certain organizations have seized upon an innovative human resource management approach: the labour loan (‘mise à disposition’ in French). This approach is intended to safeguard local jobs and increase the range of skills of those employees who benefit from it. It involves various organizations which have, as their main objective, to avoid job loss and allow participating employees to acquire new skills. A labour loan implies that the lending company will only charge the borrowing company the exact value of the wages paid to the employee during the period of the loan, in addition to the related social costs and, if applicable, the reimbursement of professional fees due to the interested party in accordance with the labour loan. This is a mechanism based on non-profit assistance which is generally preferred when companies have close relationships, be they based on geographic proximity or on socio-economic reasoning. Three industrial clusters in the Rhône-Alps region were studied, in which the use of labour loans between private organizations and a public research centre were put into practice. The base of analysis used in this study is the economy of proximity approach (Bouba-Olga and Grossetti, 2008). We attempt to answer the following question: under what conditions does proximity allow for the building of innovative forms of inter-organizational HRM, such as labour loans? The results show that proximity, be it geographic or socio-economic, facilitates the development of innovative inter-organizational HRM approaches such as the loan of employees between organizations.