We laid him off. Then we hired him back

In May, we eliminated a number of roles at Syndio as part of a company redesign.

One of the people we let go was Jonathan Vidales, a labor economist who had been with us for five years.

Around the same time, we redefined other jobs and asked those employees to take on more responsibility and a quota.

We assumed they wouldn’t blink.

These were leaner times.

Jobs were harder to come by and the pendulum had shifted back toward employers.

For those employees, we assumed, staying in a beefed-up role with a higher earning potential would be a no-brainer.

Right? Wrong.

Within a few months, several of the people I had expected to keep resigned.

Suddenly, in our push to be more efficient in the age of AI, we lost some of the very talent we needed.

The good news: Jonathan came back.

In August, he applied for one of our newly-opened roles, and we rehired him.

On a Zoom call, he told me sheepishly that coming back felt like “sneaking back in the house after I got kicked out.” That was a gut punch.

But the next part was worse: When we reactivated his account, he said, he found our cold, corporate restructuring announcement still sitting in his inbox.