The Senior management team deliberately kept secret the bad financial health of the company from its employees. At every monthly round up meeting the Account Directors (of the RPO account I worked on) would wax lyrical how the clients were happy with the hard work we had done. Then it the space of a week, they suddenly announced that the client was cutting back on its recruitment requirements and that a redundancy process was starting.
It was apparent from the beginning that Randstad were only following the process as it legally required to do and didn’t care about helping the employees at risk. Every single recommendation from the focus groups was rejected, including increasing the redundancy pay from one month to three. The issue with this they had agreed to a three month redundancy pay for a previous group that year (there were five rounds of redundancy during 2023). Randstad’s excuse was since multiple accounts were being made redundant it wasn’t fair. Actually what isn’t fair is pretending to care about your hard working employees and then dismissing any well meaning recommendation. These people have children to feed and mortgages to pay for.
Once the two week redundancy process to find alternative roles started, the HR department required the candidates to do the vast majority of the work whilst they just ticked the boxes. They claimed that there were roles, we just had to find them. As mentioned earlier multiple accounts were having cuts so again this was a lie. The HR person in my meetings constantly talked down to me and didn’t even follow up on simple requests like speaking to managers of roles I was interested in. It was humiliating and very negatively affected my mental health.
Please keep in mind this all happened in October/November, when its the hardest time of the year to find a new job. That’s why we needed a 3 month redundancy pay plan to cover us until the new year. They knew months in advance they would have to make cuts yet decided to wait until the worst time to do it, proving they couldn’t care less for their hard workers who went above and beyond for the company.
Finally you can claim that redundancy wasn’t Randstad’s fault but the current state of the economy. That could be true but the fact that multiple accounts in multiple industries (some of whom are recession proof) proves that Senior Management team mismanaged the company and punished the wrong people for it.
