The last part is important. Some people can't recognize/accept that the person is not a great worker. And then each department wonders what idiot is going to show up this week.
Completely unrelated and shifting back closer to the thread topic, great to see this org codify this ideal explicitly. People are not fungible cogs between wildly disparate roles but they are usually somewhat adaptable under ideal conditions. This also positions the org to accelerate out of macro uncertainty properly staffed.
Firing someone is admitting to your second mistake.
(Not being able to exploit the talents of someone you hired. The first mistake is hiring someone who you later have to fire.)
It was an existence proof that billionaires do not have to be heartless psychopaths - even though media consistently gives us this impression.
And - predictably - his version of the show did not rate very well, and was fundamentally less entertaining. It was soon cancelled I believe.
(I am not saying that he is a wonderful person— I don’t know him. I just know that he doesn’t outwardly celebrate the cult of cruelty that is popularly believed to be necessary for being a billionaire.)
He was hoisted up in a capsule with different contestants above Angel Falls. Branson encouraged the contestants to abandon their fears and press a button that would release the cables and send the capsule plunging to the water below. Whoever pressed the button was kicked off the show. The drop was high enough to kill them both and Branson said he couldn’t afford to have people around him that were afraid to tell him no.
What? Maybe what they were asking was just "do I need to start looking for an another source of income". Why dress it up in weird corpo-speak?
> We also looked at roles that were being cut from our headcount and saw opportunities for our team to contribute in areas where leaders wanted full-time team members but couldn't make those hires due to budget constraints.
Corporate bullshit speak for, we fired people without realising what they were actually contributing and then things started to fall apart, but we can't hire replacements, so we came up with this idea.
The role is going away because it's not profitable enough, and unless you find something else for the person to do then that person gets fired (or insert whatever the legally correct term for your area is). You also have unfulfilled roles elsewhere which would add value if they were filled but you don't have spare cash to add new people to fill them.
Instead of firing one person and hiring a different person, try and keep the person and swap their role. They may need training to do this, but while they may need to learn some new tech/etc parts they don't need to learn all the zapier specific stuff. The institutional knowledge can remain.
This can have a benefit of making people feel more comfortable to stay, an attitude of "if your project gets canned we'll try and help you into a different role"
Sure there's a lot of corpo speak here, IMO because the idea seems pretty obvious and they want a nice release here but this looks planned and well executed.
As someone in a stupidly rigid organization where managers all fight each other to get the limited headcount by inflating their own roadmap, it actually sounds refreshing.
It’s also the best way to earn the trust of leadership and ensure you’re contributing to the company’s goals.
The language may be off-putting to some, but the core idea is almost a tautology.
But I also can’t justify this ratio. When times are good they ramp up to support wild hiring.
Even if times are still good you hit some critical mass where the recruiter count just doesn’t make sense.
As much as they can be annoying at times, recruiters do get used and abused.
Wait, what? We're in a legitimate recession. Are they speaking about a recruiting downturn or an economic downturn here?
And we also realize a downturn is temporary. We worked hard to build our talent acquisition team, growing from 15 to nearly 40 between October 2021 and June 2022. And that team did amazing work, growing Zapier from 550 to over 800 team members in 2022. Did we really want to lose all of that recruiting talent only to spend all of those resources again hiring new people down the road?
Laying people off en-masse in response to what is 100% going to be a temporary downturn is just so... wasteful. You lose so much accumulated knowledge and experience, and then - as pointed out - have to turn around and spend even more money to recruit new people later. But with those new people you might get back the skills and head-count you had, but you don't get back the experience, tacit knowledge, domain knowledge, acute knowledge of internal processes and tools, etc. So really it's lose-lose-lose in many ways.
Laying people off should really be an absolute last resort, IMO. And by "last resort" I mean, "we do this or the company folds" level stuff. Not "do layoffs or the stock price drops by 0.03% and the investors start squawking."
I've also seen other things that a company puts out that makes it sound delightful (Patreon layoffs, Netflix culture) but talking to people internally gets a very different opinion.
It's a noble thing to do (even if it delays layoffs for some). Good on both companies
