Secondments at Zapier

&gt; But the real question they were asking was: &quot;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&#x27;t do the things I was initially hired to do?&quot;<p>What? Maybe what they were asking was just &quot;do I need to start looking for an another source of income&quot;. Why dress it up in weird corpo-speak?

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?

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.

This is one of the more insightful and wise things I&#x27;ve read in a while. I wish all companies understood this concept:<p><i>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?</i><p>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&#x27;t get back the experience, tacit knowledge, domain knowledge, acute knowledge of internal processes and tools, etc. So really it&#x27;s lose-lose-lose in many ways.<p>Laying people off should really be an absolute last resort, IMO. And by &quot;last resort&quot; I mean, &quot;we do this or the company folds&quot; level stuff. Not &quot;do layoffs or the stock price drops by 0.03% and the investors start squawking.&quot;

This is encouraging, as long as they can successfully implement it. Layoffs have always felt to me like a &quot;cut off your arm to lose weight&quot; 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.<p>I&#x27;ve also seen other things that a company puts out that makes it <i>sound</i> delightful (Patreon layoffs, Netflix culture) but talking to people internally gets a very different opinion.

good to finally see that someone&#x27;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&#x27;t hire the excessive number of ppl when the money is good only to later let them go

Plaid did something similar during the pandemic but still ended up laying off 20% a couple of years later.<p>It&#x27;s a noble thing to do (even if it delays layoffs for some). Good on both companies

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.

Zapier can afford to do this because their pricing is absurdly high IMO.

&gt; And we also realize a downturn is temporary.<p>Wait, what? We&#x27;re in a legitimate recession. Are they speaking about a recruiting downturn or an economic downturn here?