A CEO has responded to a "painful" viral video of a former employee who was fired from his company.
It all started when Brittany Pietsch took to TikTok to document being unexpectedly let go from Cloudflare, which specializes in providing cybersecurity amongst a host of other IT-related things to customers.
The video, which has been viewed millions of times across various social media platforms including TikTok and X, shows Pietsch fighting her case as she is being fired by someone from the company whom she claimed she has never even met before.
"When you know you're about to get laid off so you film it [...] this was traumatizing honestly lmao," she wrote in the caption of her TikTok videos.
Have a look at the video below:Pietsch was told that after finishing "evaluations of 2023 performance," they added that had "not met Cloudflare expectations for performance," and the company had chosen "to part ways" with her.
However, the employee wasn't going to just go without a fight.
"So, I started August 25th, I’ve been on a three-month ramp and then it was three weeks of December," she said, as a sales ramp measures how long it takes a new hire to reach full productivity. "And then a week of Christmas and then here we are. I have had the highest activity amongst my team."
Pietsch then went on to detail that her manager had been telling her she'd been doing a "great job" during her time here so being laid off has come as a massive shock to her, as well as her fellow co-workers, who were also laid off minutes before her.
"I have had great activity, I have really great meetings, I’m picking up the products very quickly, and things have been going really really well, I make really great relationships with my clients," she continued in the 9-minute video. "So I disagree that my performance hasn’t been- I haven’t met performance expectations, when I certainly have."
And her rant didn't stop there as she went on to lay into HR for their approach of letting people go.
"I know you guys must not be able to understand that," she said, referring to everyone's frustrations about the situation. "It must be very easy for you to just have these little 10-minute, 15-minute meetings. Tell someone that they’re fired, completely wreck their whole life, and that’s it with no explanation. That’s extremely traumatizing for people, if you can imagine that."
The HR worker responded back saying: "I’ll be honest with you, there’s nothing we’re going to say in this call in the time that we have that’s going to undo the way that you feel right in this moment.
"I personally will do everything that I can to give you as much specific information as I can after this call," they added.
After a few more back-and-forths, the clip finally concluded with HR emphasizing that there was "nothing they could say" that could change Pietsch’s feelings before they reached an agreement about the next steps.
Of course, many social media users rallied around the newly unemployed TikToker, and offered her support during this difficult time in her life while simultaneously condemning the company.
In the wake of the viral video, CEO Matthew Prince took to X (formerly Twitter) to address the situation.
Price confirmed that the company had fired around 40 sales people out of more than 1500, which he stated was a "normal quarter," before going on to say that they can "often tell within 3 months or less of a sales hire, even during the holidays, whether they’re going to be successful or not."
"Sadly, we don’t hire perfectly [but] we try to fire perfectly. In this case, clearly we were far from perfect. The video is painful for me to watch."
He then specified that "managers should always be involved" in the process of their employees being laid off saying: "HR should be involved, but it shouldn’t be outsourced to them, No employee should ever actually be surprised they weren’t performing. We don’t always get it right.
"And sometimes underperforming employees don’t actually listen to the feedback they’ve gotten before we let them go," he added.
The CEO concluded the post by explaining that while they "definitely weren’t anywhere close to perfect in this case...any healthy org needs to get the people who aren’t performing off. That wasn’t the mistake here. The mistake was not being more kind and humane as we did."
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