Oh the thickening plots.
I “stumbled across” a GameStop market HR director on LinkedIn who said he was part of the layoff.
Note: HR’s all corporate bag men who exist to create paper trails to legally fire people for discriminatory reasons, so **** this dude in particular. You’re allowed to feel bad for the middle managers who got fired. Not this guy. I sincerely hope his retirement fund is long in GameStop, and in keeping with the policies he has very likely spent his career supporting, that all of his future interviews end shortly after they see he’s 60. If you think that’s too vindictive, that’s ok; you can apologize to me whenever you meet one of these people IRL.
Now, for some fresh speculation:
Like I said, HR exists to find reasons to fire people. Laying off a senior manager is pretty weird, in no small part because HR basically runs most big companies. It’s about as close to a forever job as you can get. So with this in mind, I’m guessing the following:
It wasn’t a one-off, this-guy-has-to-go situation. When that happens it involves a lot more “spending time with my family” and a lot less “let go, looking for future opportunities”. Obviously he’s a bozo because they turfed him first, but probably not a professional liability/sexual predator/etc. (charitably assuming GameStop would even care about that; Blockbuster sure didn’t back in its day). They chose the timing and method pretty specifically.
Laying off managers at this level isn’t really the kind of thing you do to save money. Existing management isn’t going to be able to absorb a market-level HR organization as-is, and replacing bozo with a new manager isn’t going to save enough money to justify the recruitment cost.
So, my first guess is this is a prelude to a broader HR lay-off and reorganization under existing management. Why would you cut HR headcount? Really there’s only three possible reasons.
- First, because you don’t expect to fire as many people soon. I assume we can rule out GameStop’s managers somehow becoming ethical, so realistically this means: because there are going to be a LOT fewer GameStop employees very soon. This will likely mean reorganizing all stores under the surviving district managers, and making them responsible for tear down (a much much much lower-friction alternative to slashing headcount and making all district managers work though it, knowing a third of them are getting fired after the jobs done). Similar scenario would play out in staff organizations. This is also the scenario if the company is simply liquidating itself; same ****, different numbers.
- Second possibility, because they are soliciting M&A (or there is even an unannounced offer) and the company is preemptively cutting redundant staff positions (possibly to make itself look more valuable, possibly illegal coordination in advance of shareholder and regulatory approval, but the US doesn’t enforce its laws). HR, IT, similar ‘disposable’ orgs basically never survive mergers. A handful of workers get transferred, the majority always get laid off, especially the managers. The managers are useless. If you buy a company you want to integrate it, that means you want staff **** to be done your way with your managers.
- Third possibility, the new CEO sincerely thinks the HR department is over staffed / can function with fewer managers or workers. Maybe he’s right, maybe he’s an idiot who’s trying to dump work on the only people in his company that don’t want him in prison. Who knows???
