Chinese company ByteDance's HR department said that during a video conference with the team, TikTok's management fired between 70 and 100 talent workers. The announcement of the video meeting, which took place in five minutes, employees received a few hours before it on December 1 last year.
Two ByteDance Human Resources specialists note that the meeting was held in Chinese, which was simultaneously translated into English. Chinese publications talked about the reduction in December last year.
In a conversation with CNBC, HR employees said that laid-off workers were offered other positions in the company, and university graduates were guaranteed transfers to other departments.
A spokesperson for ByteDance said that all talent staff members could apply for a number of positions at the company. He assured that most of these workers successfully moved to new teams. Initially, the company was going to scale down the Talent Development workload and determine which elements needed to be scaled up for future use. However, the department was later disbanded as most of its roles and functions became out of step with current development strategies.
The press service of the company noted that the reshuffle in the team is due to the unwillingness to waste the time and energy of the team and mislead it by creating the illusion of growth. However, ByteDance will continue to make efforts to develop talent.
A similar situation happened in December last year. Better.com founder Vishal Garg fired about 900 company employees during a Zoom video conference, TechCrunch insider reports. The businessman himself said that about 1.5 thousand people were forced to leave the company. The reduction in staff Garg justified the change in the market. In September, Better.com hired 7,000 new employees.
In January, Garg returned to his role as CEO of the startup. Commenting on the decisions to lay off 900 employees, he accused them of being unproductive. The New York Times notes that Better.com conducted a study that showed the need for structural rearrangements.
Last summer, as a result of a law restricting tutoring in China, ByteDance was forced to cut a number of educational segments of its business. In total, about 250 thousand people worked in this area across the country. In autumn, the company's founder and chairman Zhang Yiming left the company. In 2022, ByteDance announced that it will reduce investment and distribute workers in this area to other areas of its business.
ByteDance has been repeatedly criticized by its employees. In late December, TikTok moderator Candy Frazier sued the company over her employer's lack of support for employees who view large amounts of traumatic content. According to her, the work caused panic attacks, depression and sleep problems.
TikTok reached 1 billion active users in September 2021.
bbabo.Net