> But the real question they were asking was: "How can I add value? How can I show that I still belong here? How can I make myself a critical part of the team at Zapier during this time when I can't do the things I was initially hired to do?"
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.
They didn't "cut headcount" by firing people, they just didn't hire new people into those roles. Instead they let people move internally to work on projects where teams wanted more headcount.
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.
The best way (far from guaranteed, but the best across a wide range of employment contexts) to avoid layoffs is to create clear value that pushes the org towards its goals.
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.
Nice approach. However, my main take-away from the article is that they have 40 recruiters for a company of 800, which seems high. I know a company expecting growth is going to need more recruiters, but still 20:1 feels excessive. Is there a widley-known ratio which is sufficient to make regular turnover of staff manageable?
According to this, those 40 recruiters grew Zapier from 550 to 800 in 2022. So they added 250 staff with about 40 recruiters, or 6.25 new hires per recruiter. That means less than 1 new hire per recruiter per month. Gitlab target 4-5 new hires per recruiter per month as per https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/hiring/metrics/
Agree, especially for being a remote company, this number is extremely low. However, other parameters, like compensation, may be affecting their ability to hire.
It's definitely excessive. Realistically, an efficient internal recruiter should be hiring a minimum of 20 people per year to justify their role. If Zapier are planning on at least doubling their headcount, then a team of 40 makes sense.
Yes Richard Branson does this and I learnt it from one of his videos. You never fire. You move them around. If they are a good person who is honest and hard working, you can find a job for them.
> You never fire. You move them around. If they are a good person who is honest and hard working, you can find a job for them.
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.
Keep in mind, if you ask a fish to climb a tree, is it the fishes’ fault when they’re flopping around on the ground? Some people are legitimately not a fit for an org, but it’s also important to be realistic about expectations. Hiring and people management in general is hard, I don’t envy anyone who has to do it at scale.
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.
That's kind of a shitty saying. We all make mistakes but the way that's phrased makes it sound unforgivable. The ramifications of hiring are bigger than your everyday mistake but it still happens.
I read it more as understanding the onus of the firing situation. Often the individual (or team) tie parts of their worth with being fired. But when it comes to planning and layoffs, that decision was made at the same level that made the decision to hire.
The ramifications of hiring are bigger. Sometimes a firing is because of the individuals lack of performance, but I think this quote is asking the hirer to be mindful of what outcomes (layoffs) come from mistakes of their decision making.
I guess it is bad if you are the manager who is responsible for both mistakes.
Otherwise, it is a reminder that it is a failure to hire someone that doesn't work out, and a failure to not be able to use someone as most people have some skills and firing someone is a very harsh thing to do both to the ex-employee in their ex co-workers.
I saw a fraction of an episode of Richard Branson’s “The Apprentice” and was struck by the fact that (unlike a different host of the US The Apprentice) he considered the act of firing someone very painful.
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.)
One lesson from Branson’s Apprentice that always stuck with me:
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.
Seems more of a TV gimmick than a test for sycophants. You know Branson does daring activities, you know you're on a TV show where the utmost care is taken by a whole team of professionals, ... it's a cheap trick.
So, instead of people who trust the proven professionals around them to do their job you get people scared of heights or averse to physical risks (who could be perfectly happy taking massive financial risks)?
Do you really think it shows anything useful?
[Where, when, which channel was this series shown, please?]
It was certainly a “made for TV” / theatrical way of making a point. But the point stuck with me as it was pretty diametrically opposed to the other Apprentice show which rewarded people for following instructions.
> you know you're on a TV show where the utmost care is taken by a whole team of professionals
I think that’s kind of the point though, is if you’re saying you’re capable of being President of Virgin (the prize I believe), then there is little to no safety net. You are the professional in charge responsible for everyone else’s safety. If you just assume that Branson’s prepared and thought of everything already then you’re not adding the value he’s looking for. He wants people that are skeptical of every detail and proposition (even his).
But granted it’s not the actual way he’d vet for this quality. It was spiced up for TV. I just found it impactful that he valued that skeptic quality in his team.
Thanks for the clip, it really is pretty dumb. They just had a challenge where they jumped/fell off the cliff with a bungee cord as a team-building exercise. It looks like they were expected to say "yes" to that but say "no" to falling off in what was described as a "high-tech barrel." Maybe there were cues or other information not shown in the clip, but I have no idea how any contestant was supposed to assess the risk of either of those activities.
“These steady, guaranteed, market beating returns that have no risk are safe because Madoff wouldn’t risk life in prison running a fraud. Plus, it’s registered with the SEC”
is roughly equivalent to:
“This 350’ drop and metal capsule with no parachute are safe because Branson is here. Plus, I’m on a TV show so I’m sure they have a safety crew.”
These examples show just how much we trust others and how easily we can be persuaded into taking huge, unnecessary risk when a prize is dangled in front of us.
There are people who refused to invest in Madoff while their friends or competitors were getting rich. And there are people who would refuse to press that button. They’re incredibly rare, but that’s what you’re looking for when you want someone making billion dollar decisions that affect tons of jobs/livelihoods.
If you bet alongside Branson 100% of the time, you’d do really well in life. But he wouldn’t gain any value.
But to him, you are a tool that helps him get better. You playing the odds and agreeing with him doesn’t help him. You calling bullshit the 0.01% of the time when he’s dead wrong is what he needs. You’re not his next billion dollar idea. You’re his bankruptcy / financial death safety net. He doesn’t want someone making a prisoner’s dilemma (we’ll sink or swim together) / “no one got fired for choosing IBM” (no one got fired for agreeing with Branson) kind of decision. He wants you to say “Knowing what I know, I can’t go along with this.”
So it’s a very theatrical way of seeing if you have the courage to save him from himself, in a way that makes for a good 10 second TV teaser for non-business folks.
> I think that’s kind of the point though, is if you’re saying you’re capable of being President of Virgin (the prize I believe), then there is little to no safety net. You are the professional in charge responsible for everyone else’s safety.
But you're not, in that situation. That's sort of the point.
This isn't hiring for prudence, this is hiring for ability to guess Branson's gotcha.
Well the contestant believed they were in charge of the drop. Common sense tells you that a 350’ drop will kill you, but they assumed it was safe because Branson was there. So, he wants people who will view a scenario objectively and not be biased by his presence or opinions.
As a control it would have been interesting to have half the contestants in a capsule by themselves and see how many were willing to drop without him there. I bet many would have still pressed the button.
Some people are blinded by winning and take huge, inappropriate risks to try to win. It’s a skill to be able to not play the game when the risks are too high.
Or, it could have just been a test to see who’s brave enough to call bullshit when things get absurd.
Common sense tells me that there’s no way a tv show and a billionaire would let me kill myself and others. So that would make me think that there’s some characteristic of the capsule or the falls that would make the drop survivable.
This text seems stupid for weeding out a specific type of contestant.
There’s lots of scenarios of people who would or would not press the button. They may as well flip a coin.
My biggest complaint is that it rewards hesitation or inability to decide and isn’t really a forcing function.
> Common sense tells me that there’s no way a tv show and a billionaire would let me kill myself and others. So that would make me think that there’s some characteristic of the capsule or the falls that would make the drop survivable.
Right, so you have to weigh this faith in the system (game shows are safe & billionaires won’t do anything extremely risky) against the facts of nature and a suspicious story being told to you. Probably 99.99% of people would push the button.
In a business setting if Branson approved a deal, and the due diligence (safety team) approved a deal, you could be forgiven for assuming it’s a smart deal. But when it comes to decisions you absolutely have to get right he wants people who ignore the advice of others and make their own independent assessment based on facts.
When you assume another team has done their job and they assume you’ve done yours you can get into a circular logic where no one has done their job and most people march forward (see Madoff documentary). In retrospect the risks were obvious and the story unbelievable. He wants that rare person who calls bullshit (Harry Markopolos) when all the other signals are saying “it’s safe”.
Many of the Madoff victims said the same thing: “It’s Madoff”, “It’s registered with the SEC”. They didn’t think a successful billionaire would do something so dumb that it would cost him and those around him everything.
Yes, you can forgive the victims for thinking the system should have protected them and you can still applaud Markopolos for not buying the bullshit and refusing to push the button.
Yes, Branson’s stunt is an imperfect/theatrical version of this and the challenge is biased in favor of people who are indecisive or afraid of heights. Almost all TV is sensationalized to appeal to an audience that wouldn’t be riveted by contestants pouring over a series of hedge fund returns trying to determine if they’re safe or fraudulent investments. It’s more the symbolism that’s important.
100% this, as if Branson would have been in any danger at all. That's really shitty if they genuinely kicked off contestants for that reason, if that's the correct story.
Yes that’s the episode I saw. I’m not sure if they were kicked off for pressing the button - they were definitely punished and “taught a lesson”. Maybe they had less points or dollars going into the next challenge or something.
Edit: someone linked to a summary of the episode, below, and they did kick the person off for it. Harsh!
> Branson said he couldn’t afford to have people around him that were afraid to tell him no.
So the lesson here is even for a decision that will kill him and everyone around him, he would still rather not entertain debate and challenge from his subordinates?
In some countries the laws are such that it is very hard to give someone a pay cut (Sweden, for example). It can be done, but a big challenge.
IMO, I think a lot of employers that I have worked with really undervalued how expensive it is to hire someone.
Another option is a company like Daily has a transparent, years-of-experience based, pay structure. So if you switch to a new role, it is clear how your compensation will change:
There are significant differences between the two, for both the employer and the employee.
In terms of economic theory, you’d say that staying within “the firm” (Coase) saves both of them a lot in transaction costs.
In normal terms — the employee spent time and money finding the previous job and spent time learning how to exist inside that company. Instead of immediately needing to discard and repay those costs - they can “hit the ground running” in a role that is more suited to them.
And so on. To overlook all of the advantages here would be very cynical.
This is where I feel if you hire the right person, they can very easily be equally effective in another role within a very short period of time. Business context is key. They have it, so it is much easier for both them and me. Also they don't want to leave the company, that is the critical thing here.
The four times I've been seconded over the last 20 years it has always been to "act up" and come with a temporary pay bump. Usually because I'm taking over a manager's job while they're on maternity leave / until a new one can be found because they've quit, or because a team could do with one of my weird skills for a few months. In my experience people either stay at the same pay or their pay goes up while on secondment. Secondment is generally supposed to be temporary so "overpaying" someone for a few months is generally worth it, especially when you consider the costs of onboarding a new employee.
For the worker, it can be the difference between homelessness and merely tough times; between covered medical insurance and untreated disease; between hopelessness and a wake-up call.
For the company, it can be finding that someone was put into a bad spot and they are now able to shine without having to pay for new talent acquisition.
This is one of the more insightful and wise things I've read in a while. I wish all companies understood this concept:
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."
This is encouraging, as long as they can successfully implement it. Layoffs have always felt to me like a "cut off your arm to lose weight" solution. Yes the number on the scale went down and you hit your goal, but are you really better off in the long term? Worse because so many companies do indiscriminate layoffs and take on huge costs for doing so, and then just open all these positions back up in a few months.
I would love to hear about people at Zapier talking about this process -- it sounds delightful. Many companies have a really rough internal transfer process and being able to try out or go into a new role sounds like a really good fit.
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.
good to finally see that someone's first instinct during the difficult times, are not to fire immediately but maybe slow a bit and think about how we can work with what we have + don't hire the excessive number of ppl when the money is good only to later let them go
It is nice when you have possibility to move horizontally across the company. It brings a lot of new insights how other teams work. This is good even in small companies.
How far out do we want to go with this? Do we want to get insanely pedantic and state that the Ice Age was temporary? Would a years-long recession still amount to "temporary downturn"? The questions are ludicrous, including yours.
The average length of recessions since WWII has been about 10 months. The longest was 18 months. Do you have any reason to think the next recession will be much longer than that?
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?