June 22 (Reuters) – One by one, Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) called some members of its newly hired class who had recently graduated from college during the last week of May and retracted the job offers within 15 minutes of calls, according to some of the recipients.
“It was traumatic,” Iris Guo, a Toronto-based associate product manager, told Reuters. In a video call at 10:45 p.m., she received the bad news that her job had been cut. Since then, she has been looking for new employment to secure her US work visa.
More than 21,500 tech workers in the United States have lost their jobs so far this year, according to Layoffs.fyi, a website that monitors job cuts. According to outplacement services firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, tech layoffs in May alone have skyrocketed 780% in the combined first four months of the year.
But recent graduates like Guo, who graduated from the University of Waterloo and majored in financial management and computer science, represent a new dimension to the cuts as their burgeoning careers are eliminated before they even begin. The trend reflects new austerity policies spreading across some parts of the tech industry, such as B. Crypto and venture capital backed companies.
Crypto firms have tightened their belts as a result of the recent crash in cryptocurrency prices, and venture-backed companies are also cutting costs to avoid returning to the market for additional funding, said Kyle Stanford, senior venture capital analyst at Pitchbook.
Crypto company Coinbase Global Inc (COIN.O) laid off 18% of its employees this month, payments firms Klarna and Bolt Financial together laid off over 900 employees, while big names like Meta Platforms Inc, Lyft Inc (LYFT.O) and Uber Technologies Inc ( UBER.N) have said they will slow down or freeze the setting.
In a seeming countertrend to the Great Retirement of 2022, when legions quit for new jobs, some tech jobseekers are now facing cost-cutting and hiring freezes amid four decades of high inflation, a war raging in Ukraine and the ongoing pandemic.
For those willing to join Twitter, billionaire Elon Musk’s whims have also caused stress. Musk has agreed to buy Twitter for $44 billion, but his recent tweets have raised questions about when and if the acquisition will be complete. Continue reading
According to experts from recruitment and consulting firms, the overall hiring rate in the technology sector has remained strong. Tech roles in healthcare and finance are strong, as is information technology, said Thomas Vick, a Texas-based regional director for the tech practice of staffing firm Robert Half.
But for the incoming class of college recruits, the loss of their job offers is particularly damaging now, as they say they are locked out of companies like Meta Platforms, Alphabet Inc’s Google (GOOGL.O) and other tech giants that have already secured themselves their new cohort of recruits.
Lucas Durrant, an electrical engineering graduate from Canada, was scheduled to start his new job as a software engineer at Bolt last week. When he was on vacation a few weeks ago, he received an email that his offer had been withdrawn. Bolt said layoffs would begin in late May, citing economic conditions.
“It feels a bit like a race against the clock before we see a bigger economic downturn,” Durrant said. “Soon I will also compete against 2023 graduates.”
LIMITED OPTIONS
At least 40 college graduates have lost job offers in recent weeks, according to LinkedIn posts and Google spreadsheets circulating online to help those affected find new jobs.
On Tuesday, 22 recent graduates were listed in a spreadsheet whose offers were rescinded by Twitter, and nine people were listed in a separate spreadsheet for Coinbase.
In a statement, Twitter said it acknowledged the withdrawn offers could put candidates in a difficult position and said it was offering compensation to those affected.
Coinbase referenced a June 2 blog post that said the decision to withdraw a number of offers was not taken lightly, but was “necessary to ensure we only grow in the areas of highest priority.”
Chloe Ho, a University of California, Davis graduate who is originally from Hong Kong, has until September 29 to find a new job or be forced to leave the United States. Ho had accepted a job as a content marketing specialist for an online grocery company called Weee! before the position was withdrawn.
As a non-US citizen who needs a new employer to fund her work visa, “my options are very limited,” she said.
Ho said she’s canceled a lease on a new apartment in the San Francisco Bay Area, retired from vacation plans with friends, and will now spend the next three months networking for a new job by day and submitting applications by night. “I had everything planned out around this job,” she said.
Many affected graduates used LinkedIn to express their disappointment, detail how the withdrawn offers upended international relocation plans, and solicit recommendations for new businesses.
Alumni who spoke to Reuters said they were surprised by the reach of people offering their help. Still, the pain of losing your dream job lingers.
A recent college graduate who wanted to join Coinbase and declined to be named due to his ongoing job search said that just a week before he lost his job offer, he received an email from Coinbase with assurances that the company would not plan to withdraw existing offers.
“I was disappointed for several reasons. I didn’t think the leadership would make that decision,” he said.
While companies save some money in the short term, they risk “potentially catastrophic” reputational damage, said Brian Kropp, Gartner’s distinguished vice president of human resources.
“Just think how unfair that is to the people you’re withdrawing the offer from,” he said. “You’re putting her in a painful situation.”
Reporting by Sheila Dang in Dallas Editing by Kenneth Li and Matthew Lewis
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