Getting Fired

There are so many so-called “failures” people won’t admit to, and you’re right, it’s unfortunate because it makes others feel inadequate.

In truth, I’ve never been let go but it’s happened to my husband twice (one only two months after he started the new job in one case!). In my industry, lay-offs are very, very common which is why it helps that my husband and I essentially live off one income. The last time they cut heads around here, no one worked the entire day, we just kept waiting for our director to direct us into the conference room where the bloodshed was happening! It’s a horribly uncomfortable feeling for everyone.

Mr. Cheap:

In the past almost 8 years at my company I’ve seen many of my co-workers get the axe. There have been about 4-5 rounds of cuts in that time and almost inevitably, they go on a hiring spree about 3-4 months later. It’s no wonder people generally don’t stick around with the same company for very long anymore.

Unfortunately, in a cyclical industry, it’s about the quarter or year-end bottom line and sometimes they just need to get “heads off the books”. As unemployment continues to shrink, they won’t have the luxury to cut a head or two for a few months and then re-hire. Ultimately, it’s a very expensive practice for short term thinking.

Fired thrice and *$&^ proud of it! Good heavens. Thank goodness for firings. If I hadn’t been fired I could still be ….
1. a telephone marketer – one of those people who ruin your suppers (I lasted 4 hours)
2. working as a bank teller (didn’t pass my probation. couldn’t balance at the end of the day to save my life)
3. ok this wasn’t ‘fired’ per se, it was ‘downsized’ (but I still took it personally) – crunching registration numbers at a small esl college that completely collapsed 2 years after I was ‘let go’.
In between were some pretty terrific experiences (like going back to university) and I’ve had a couple wonderful career positions since then – and now have my own business, the ‘crowning glory’ imho.
Fired shmired, I say.

Hey Cheap, aren’t you like making 65k now? Isn’t that like more than the median Canadian family? (not just those under 30) Seems to me that you’re doing pretty darn good for a guy who’s been fired twice!

As to the fire/hire cycles mentioned by Telly, it’s just part of the game. For some bigger companies, the spree is never-ending, but even then it’s becoming standard procedure for some companies. Especially in the Knowledge Worker fields, it’s becoming well-known that top producers make like 10-50% more but deliver 2-10x more productivity (IT is a great example here).

Good, big companies don’t cut top producers, they cut the fat and try to hire better replacements. If you look up GE or Six Sigma processes you’ll get a better feel for what’s happening here. The goal is to cycle out the chaff or just “the mistakes”.

If you look at Krystal’s company (even though they’re not really big), this is pretty much what’s happened to her. The company puts people on a test drive for 3 months and mercilessly cuts the ones they don’t want. In Krystal’s case it sounds quite distinctly like she wasn’t the person they wanted for the job, even if she was quite competent and capable.

Hiring people is expensive, but hiring the wrong people is also expensive. We’re all familiar with the first case (McDs, Walmart), but very few people are familiar with the second case b/c very few companies spend lots of time correctly grooming their staff.

So Krystal was just “groomed out”. They didn’t really fire her, they just took her for a test drive and put her back before firing her became too expensive. They didn’t tell her that she sucked, they just told her she wasn’t right, which is about as soft a rejection as you can get.

I’m guess that they did this because they “made a mistake”, so to speak. They probably didn’t pick the right person, so Krystal’s capacities didn’t really matter.