Amazon had to meet internal employee turnover targets. So they hired people to fire her

Although it may seem counterproductive, there are companies that hire people without the intention of them remaining in the company. In short, they use them as tools to balance figures on their balance sheets, discarding them once they have achieved their objective. But not to work.

A good example was Meta’s overhiring during the pandemic, in which the best engineers were hired not to work on their projects, but to prevent them from going to the competition. Without abandoning Meta, the former Slack CEO revealed that Meta had been excessively increasing its headcount only to get its middle management promoted.

In reality, it didn’t matter the validity of the new employees, when the middle positions were promoted, many of those new employees became part of Meta’s layoff rounds.

Hire cannon fodder for layoffs

In research published by Business Insiderit was shown that Meta was not the only one who hired employees without the intention of them doing a job in the company. Amazon also hired people and fired them after a while to meet internal turnover goals (URA). Unregretted Attrition or unregretted desertion) that their managers claimed.

According to sources in the American media, executives pressured managers to fire a certain percentage of people each year in order to renew the teams and get rid of those employees who were not 100% committed.

However, to protect the teams that already worked well together, managers hired new employees with the intention of firing them when the time came. “We could hire people we knew we were going to fire, just to protect the rest of the team,” confessed a middle manager.

According to the media, Andy Jassy himself would have used this tactic known as “hiring to fire” before running the company, assuming a turnover rate of 6% of the employees on his team. If the team did not meet that percentage one year, the difference to the goal was added to the following year.

The way to fire these “scapegoats” was not direct, but rather they were included in performance improvement programs. Once there, they were asked for unrealistic objectives, so their chances of saving themselves from dismissal were reduced.

When one of the numerous rounds of layoffs that the company has suffered since 2020 began, those employees were always part of them and the managers kept their teams cohesive. Asked by the American media, Amazon has denied all knowledge of this practice, although part of its current management was equipment manager in those years.

These staff rotation practices explain, to a large extent, the high turnover of technology companies and the large rounds of layoffs that have been seen in recent years, while at the same time, these same companies did not stop hiring new employees.

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Image | Wikimedia Commons (JD Lasica)