Abbreviations in VK. Failed performance review?
What happened?
Throughout 2023, the VK company actively expanded its staff. From press release of the company for December 2023, it follows that every 4th employee joined it in 2023.
What usually happens to IT companies after such rapid growth? They are making cuts. Here are just a few examples:
“Meta” (recognized as an extremist organization) during the COVID-19 pandemic increases its staff by 62%, but in 2022 carries out massive layoffswhich continue to this day.
Google. In January 2023 begins massive layoffs. Google CEO Pichai Sundar recalled that in the last two years the company has grown rapidly, which was accompanied by an increase in the number of personnel. “But we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.” Abbreviations continued and in 2024.
“Microsoft”. Between 2017 and 2021 increases staffing by 46%, but already in January 2023 it begins massive layoffs, which are still ongoing.
As we can see, the situation with layoffs after rapid growth is common in the IT industry. Management in such companies operates according to the following principle: let’s hire great IT specialists, tell them “do it beautifully,” and they’ll come up with something for us.
If IT specialists fail to come up with “something” that makes a profit, companies complain about the “different economic reality” and make layoffs.
In practice, this management principle is clearly visible in the Performance Review procedure – a process in which you must show what great things you have done for the company and how much business value you have brought. The problem is that you don’t know whether you bring this very value or not, and you really can’t influence the decision. You can only write what you did, but the decision itself is a black box. Bosses make whatever decisions they want. And it doesn’t matter how valuable your work really is. Due to the fact that decision-making criteria are unknown, PR is very convenient to use to justify dismissals: “They just didn’t pass the review well.” It seems that this is exactly the tactic that VK chose: all the facts of dismissals there that we became aware of are formally related to the unsuccessful completion of the Performance Review.
What happened in VK?
In April 2022 at Ozon there have been massive layoffs. Some online publications connected them with the personality of Vice President of Human Resources Anastasia Kuchay, who came to the company a year earlier.
In July 2024, Anastasia Kuchay moved from Ozon to VK, and the Performance Review process there changed dramatically. If previously PR in VK was carried out once a year, now they plan to conduct it twice. The first one-to-one meetings and evaluations began to be received by employees in August – a month after the arrival of the new head of HR. Negative PR assessments became the “ground” for mass layoffs, which, in our opinion, are nothing more than layoffs.
What is the scale of the cuts? It is difficult to estimate because the company used a sophisticated strategy to carry it out:
Almost every employee who wrote to us was sure that their situation was individual. Only a few noticed a trend in layoffs and estimated their scale at about 200 people. There was also evidence from existing employees about the reduction of entire teams.
The company added a non-disclosure clause to the parties’ agreement regarding information that “discredits the honor of the company”. Many employees perceived this clause as a ban on publishing any information about the conditions of dismissal.
The attempt to keep the agreement of the parties secret is an innovation that we have not encountered before. We talked with our lawyers, here is the comment from our comrades:
All comprehensive categories of confidential information Here. From this list, an NDA can only be imposed on a trade secret
Trade secrets are being introduced as a regime for handling information; NDA alone is not enough; there must be local acts on the assessment of information and the damage from its disclosure. The information contained in the termination agreement cannot be considered a trade secret.
In addition, the Federal Law “On Trade Secrets” Art. 5 establishes that information about the number, composition of employees, the wage system, working conditions, including labor protection, indicators of industrial injuries and occupational diseases, and the availability of vacancies cannot be classified as a trade secret.
The termination agreement essentially consists of information related to the wage system, since it cannot contain any other information.
Thus:
1. Working conditions and the amount of compensation upon dismissal cannot be part of a trade secret. You can find out about this, for example, at website of the prosecutor's office.
2. Trade secret is a mode of handling information. One clause about “damage to reputation” is not enough. There must be local regulations that describe the damage from the disclosure of certain categories of information, and the employee must be familiar with them.
Therefore, non-disclosure requirements have no legal force. The point of these NDAs is to intimidate workers so that those fired are afraid to tell colleagues or journalists about what is happening. This approach with scary tales allowed us to avoid a negative information background. The result is a very effective invention, which in fact has no legal force, but works as it should. You can feel the hand of a professional.
But what prevented the cuts from being carried out publicly and with official statements, as Meta (recognized as an extremist organization), Google or Microsoft did? Banal savings on employees.
How should the reduction take place?
Rapid recruitment and subsequent layoffs of employees is part of the business strategy of large IT companies. Companies have the right to lay off employees, but must do so properly. To lay off an employee by law, you need to pay from 3 to 5 average monthly salaries, and the layoff procedure itself can last from 2 to 5 months.
Apparently, the scenario of official reduction under the Labor Code of the Russian Federation did not suit the leadership of the VKand there they took a different path:
Initiated Mid-year PR;
Under the pretext PR results started the downsizing process in the company;
PR results are not significant from the point of view of the labor code, therefore, employees were taken on a show-off basis, convincing them to sign dismissals by agreement of the parties;
To avoid publicity of this scheme, a non-disclosure clause was added to the agreement of the parties and they are used as a nightmare for dismissed employees.
The savings from this method are easy to calculate. Let's assume that it was necessary to lay off 200 employees with a salary of 200k. According to the law, the company had to pay from 120 to 200 million rubles. Carrying out such a procedure twice a year is approximately 0.5 billion rubles of additional costs. If you dismiss by agreement of the parties, then you can reduce additional costs to zero; it all depends on the terms of the agreement. Therefore, it is not surprising that the company prefers to spend this money on hiring new employees rather than cutting them off with the required benefits. A company that has taken the path of effective (from the employer's point of view) Performance Review will thus minimize costs. But the most disgusting part of this process is not even the amount of payments, but who is responsible for the dismissal.
The management of VK is trying to reduce everything to the fact that the employees themselves are to blame for the layoffs, and are preventing the dissemination of information that in fact the company is carrying out layoffs by coming up with NDA agreements.
Conclusions
There have been reductions, but it is not possible to obtain exact information about the quantity. Most likely, we are talking about several hundred employees;
Reductions are not related to losses companies. The company's net loss for 2023 increased 9 timeshowever this didn't hurt increase staffing by 33%. In our opinion, layoffs are a natural process after rapid recruitment and restructuring within the company;
The next PR will most likely be tougher than the September one. The company introduced the new PR procedure in a great hurry and therefore did not turn on this mechanism to its full potential;
Introducing tough PR does not mean stopping the hiring of new employees. Moreover, the number of employees recruited may increase. This is a standard practice of large IT companies – to lay off those who “did not bring business value” and hire new employees in the hope of a “success story”.
If you have already resigned by agreement of the parties, then it will not be easy to prove the fact of pressure from the company. The greatest chances are for those dismissed employees whose agreement between the parties stipulates one or less than one average monthly salary as severance compensation. Court is a lengthy matter, but if you decide to go to court, we will help you draw up a claim. Write to our feedback bot.
