Google HR laid off while interviewing candidate for a job role, says ‘call got disconnected suddenly’

In an unexpected turn of events, a Google HR employee discovered that he had been fired while on call with a candidate. Dan Lanigan Ryan, a recruiter for Morgan McKinley at Google's Dublin office, learned that he had been fired when his ongoing call with one of his candidates abruptly ended.

Dan Lanigan-Ryan, a Google recruiter, told Business Insider that his phone was disconnected while he was on the phone with a potential candidate. During the call on Friday, he attempted but failed to log in to an internal company website. He wasn't the only one on his team who was having problems. Other members of his team reported being logged out of their systems as well. Their manager dismissed the concern as a technical issue until they received an email informing them of the layoff.

Ryan claimed that shortly after losing access to the company website, both his email and the call with his candidate were blocked. "And then that was it," he said. "I was blocked out of everything. And then I saw on the news about 15, 20 minutes later that Google was announcing 12,000 layoffs."

Ryan was hired under a contract that Google extended by one year from its original expiration date in September 2022. He and a few of his coworkers were transferred from the hiring of marketing personnel to the hiring of Google Cloud personnel, a division that was experiencing strong growth. This, Ryan said to the news website, gave him hope that he was secure.

Ryan also wrote a lengthy article about his firing on LinkedIn. He admitted that Google was his ideal company. When he received the job offer from Google a year ago, he was taking his dog for a walk. His joy, however, was fleeting because a year later he was affected by the Google layoffs.

In a LinkedIn post, he wrote, “I did not expect it to come to such an abrupt end, blocked out of the system in the middle of a call. My contract was just extended for another year and I was moved to the Cloud Sales recruitment team (an area that is seeing massive growth) and only a week ago there was talk of a pay rise, I've been caught off guard.”

Google has been chastised by its employees for a lack of support, transparency, and communication following the announcement of 12,000 job cuts. Employees are dissatisfied with the lack of answers to questions such as what was the basis for the firing, what Pichai meant when he said in his email that he takes "full responsibility" for the situations that led the company here, and so on.

Some Google employees have taken to the company's question-and-answer platform Dory to question the company's leadership and the reason for the layoff.

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