US-based HR-tech company Namely has reportedly downsized 40% of its staff including some senior level executives and CxOs.
According to a TechCrunch report, the eight-year-old startup has laid off over 400 employees or 40% of its workforce. The cuts are across the board, from high-ranking staffers, including a CFO who was brought on almost exactly two years ago, and a chief security officer who has spent just the last year with the company, to its entire customer success team.
According to the report, Namely CEO Larry Dunivan had earlier said that the company reduced executive pay five weeks ago in an attempt to avoid laying off. But due to the severe impact because of the coronavirus on business, firings have become inevitable.
He also shared the difficulties of running a startup right now that depends largely on small- and medium-size businesses, noting that even though Namely’s customers sign up for between one- and three-year-long contracts — they also pay an additional amount for a minimum number of employees — many of those customers are finding it difficult to fulfill those contracts at the moment.
In his earlier conversation with the news website TechCrunch, Dunivan had highlighted the impact of the pandemic of the company’s business model.
“This is an extraordinarily difficult time, but we look at the world through a fairly conservative lens and we’re making certain assumptions about how new customers will buy, how existing customers will increase or decrease headcount, and how many businesses will be closed and never to come back,” he said.
“It’s my belief that the recovery will start to show signs of life in the fourth quarter and into the first quarter, and our current looks at it through that lens,” he added. “But in the meantime, employers will be paying fewer people.”
Namely, an eight-and-a-half-year-old, New York-based company that sells payroll, talent management, and other HR services to mid-size businesses across the U.S. via subscription software.
Layoffs have become a common news nowadays with many new-age startups struggling to meet ends. According to Layoffs.fyi, site that’s trying to track industry layoffs as they happen, at least 356 startups have now laid off 34343 employees.
The International Labour Organization had earlier predicated that the world will see a loss of about 25mn jobs. In the US alone about 4mn people have filed for unemployment benefits signalling towards a job crisis like never before.
