A recruiter who learnt from other companies' layoffs

The first layoff I watched from close by was not one I ran. In January 2002 I sat in a meeting room at Groupe Varennor Conseil in Montréal while our managing director told forty-one programmers, over a speakerphone, that their client contracts had ended and that the firm could not keep them on the bench past the end of the month. I had recruited most of them. Several had moved from France and Romania for the work. I spent the following weeks telephoning each of them, passing on whatever openings I could find, and learning how much of a person's situation a company never asks about before it decides.

I grew up in Chicoutimi, where my father was an electrician at a pulp mill and my mother taught primary school. I studied industrial relations at Collège universitaire Montbrun in Montréal, finishing in May 1998, and expected to work in labour relations. Instead a professor's former student offered me a recruiting job at Varennor, which placed programmers with insurers, banks and government departments racing to correct date-handling code before the year 2000. I learnt to read a résumé for COBOL and mainframe experience, and that a contractor's loyalty lasted as long as the next contract. When remediation work ended and the technology market fell in 2001, I learnt the other half of the business. Varennor ended about 140 contracts over two years, and I was the person who knew each contractor's name.

In April 2003 I became the first HR manager at Logiciels Ormeval, a Montréal maker of payroll and time-tracking software for Québec employers. There were 180 of us and no salary structure; pay had been set by whoever hired each person, in whatever state the market had been that month. I built our first bands and our first overtime rules for support staff, and completed a part-time graduate diploma in compensation management at Institut Varenne-Laforge in the evenings. When a US software group bought Ormeval in 2006 and moved HR to its own head office, I decided to see how a larger company worked.

Tamberlane Systems in Ottawa sold network-monitoring software to telecommunications carriers and employed about 2,100 people. I was HR business partner to research and development, then senior manager for R&D and operations. In November 2008 the company cut 9% of its roles evenly across departments. In June 2009 it cut another 11%, again evenly. I helped carry out both. The second round was worse than the first, not because it was larger but because everyone could see that the first had removed people without removing any work. The engineers who remained had carried their departed colleagues' projects for seven months, and many of the strongest had already decided to leave. I have thought about those two rounds more than about anything else in my working life.

I returned to Montréal in August 2011 to lead HR at Studio Corvelle, a game studio owned by a European publisher. We grew from 260 to 640 people in five years, and about a fifth of our hires came from outside Canada on work permits. I learnt immigration practice from the inside: how long each route took, what a permit tied to one employer means for someone who loses that job, and how a spouse's career can depend on paperwork filed by an HR team. I also learnt what crunch costs. In 2013 I persuaded our studio head to cap overtime before milestones and to repay it in time off that people actually took. When the publisher cancelled one of our projects in 2015, 118 roles ended, and 27 of those colleagues held permits tied to Corvelle.

From February 2017 I was vice-president, people, at Brévalle Numérique, a Montréal IT services firm of about 2,300 people delivering software and cloud work for clients in Québec, Ontario and the north-eastern United States. Most client work was in English, while our employees were entitled to work in French. I reviewed every posting that asked for English and found that many asked out of habit. We removed the requirement from 41% of them. In March 2020 I helped move the firm to remote work within a fortnight, and by 2021 I had concluded that consultants needed regular time together more than a fixed office schedule.

I joined Kestrelford in May 2021, when it was hiring forty people a month. Twenty-one months later I was carrying out a reduction of 214 roles, and fourteen months after that I was explaining to 612 colleagues why their options were worth less than they had believed and what we would do about it. Through both, I argued for the practice I learnt in Ottawa and at Varennor: tell people the arithmetic, including the parts that reflect badly on management.

My working habits follow from that. I write recommendations to our committee with the option I rejected and the name of the colleague who argued for it. I ask managers to explain a decision to the employee before they explain it to me. I keep a short list of numbers I am prepared to publish and defend, and I try to make it longer every year. People who work with me would say I am patient with disagreement and impatient with vagueness, that I answer in French or English depending on who asked, and that I would rather publish a figure and be challenged on it than keep it private and be suspected.

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