Well, I was fired today, for the first time in the 14 years since I entered the working world. I was with this company for 3 years and 1.5 months. I was hired on in June 2020 as a recruiter and absolutely rocked it out of the park. In March, our recruiting team was absorbed by our HR department and I was made an HR Generalist. Honestly, I preferred this work to recruiting. I only received positive feedback, both from the team members I supported and from management. Summers tend to offer a lull in the busyness of the job, so I would occasionally scroll through my phone (discretely, I thought). One of my managers called me out for it and I stopped this habit right then and there. Other than this minor infraction, I was never told that my performance was of concern to anyone. Today, I log into work and less than 10 minutes later, receive that ominous “do you have a moment?” message from my manager. I hop on a Teams call and, bam, I’m being let go due to ongoing performance issues. The cell phone “use” was brought up briefly as well. Myself and another one of my colleagues, who is an equally good worker, were the ones to get the axe. Now, get this: this coworker works remotely from Georgia. I’m local to HQ, but am moving away from the area in two weeks’ time. We both came to the conclusion that they let us go due to us being entirely remote by next month; however, they chose to feed us the bullshit excuse that we were being let go due to performance. Shortly before the pandemic began, our company sunk multiple millions of dollars into a new home office. Now, they’re big mad that a majority of their employees don’t come into the office (bc why would they face shit morning traffic if they can do their jobs effectively from home) and we believe that they are moving to an enforced hybrid model for all employees. Unfortunately, because they chose to give the reason for my termination as performance-related, I’m unable to use them as a reference.
Fuck ‘em.