When a call with one of his applicants abruptly disconnected, a Google recruiter claimed that’s when he realized he’d lost his job.
During the call on Friday, Dan Lanigan-Ryan attempted to access an internal business website but was unsuccessful, he told Insider. His management blamed technical difficulties after hearing from other team members who had experienced similar troubles, he claimed. A little while afterwards, according to Lanigan-Ryan, his email was banned, and then his candidate’s phone was disconnected.
“And then that was it,” he said. “I was blocked out of everything. And then I saw on the news about 15, 20 minutes later that Google was announcing 12,000 layoffs.”
Since November 2021, Ryan had been working under contract for headhunter Morgan McKinley at Google’s Dublin, Ireland, location. Despite being compensated by Morgan McKinley, he claimed that “for all intents and purposes, I was a Google team member.” The public announcement of mass layoffs by Google occurred on Friday at around 2:30 a.m. PST, or 10:30 a.m. local time in Dublin, after employees there had reported to work for the day.
Only emails from Morgan McKinley, which Insider was able to read, informed affected employees that their job would end on February 3 and that they needed to return their equipment to Google. Lanigan-Ryan claimed he had not received any notification from Google regarding his termination.
Astonishment about Google’s lack of communication on the layoffs has been expressed by other fired employees.
The business notified US employees of their termination via email. Anna Ratner, a seven-year Google veteran who most recently served on the company’s trust and safety team, said to Insider that she encountered an “access denied” error when attempting to enter her work computers on Friday morning. A pop-up window containing details regarding severance and compensation then appeared on her laptop.
“We don’t have a job for you,” was the only email that was sent, according to Ratner. She commented that she wasn’t sure how else Google could have simultaneously informed thousands of employees that they were being laid off, despite the fact that it was “extremely impersonal.”
‘I thought I was safe’
Although Lanigan-Ryan admitted he had seen certain budget cuts, particularly those affecting spending on social events, he hadn’t anticipated layoffs.
A hiring pause was instituted by Google in the summer, according to him, although it was short-lived. According to Ryan, Google extended his contract for an additional year. Originally, it was scheduled to expire in September 2022.
He claimed to have learned from other employees that while Google might decide not to extend some people’s contracts, it would never terminate them early. He claimed that late in 2022, Google shifted him and a few other Dublin employees from hiring marketing people to hiring staff for Google Cloud, an industry that was experiencing rapid growth.
