Sacked staff have criticised the buy now pay later firm Klarna for its chaotic handling of job cuts, including in the UK, and questioned the chief executive’s decision to publicise a list of fired staff who are now scrambling for work.
UK employees affected by the cuts told the Guardian they felt “blindsided” by the Swedish firm’s announcement last week, when its co-founder and boss Sebastian Siemiatkowski revealed it would be cutting more than 700 of its 7,000-plus global staff, including some hired just weeks earlier.
Klarna, which is the leading buy now pay later (BNPL) provider in the UK with 17 million customers, has blamed the cuts on a predicted drop in consumer spending, sparked by surging inflation and fears over an economic recession linked to the war in Ukraine.
Siemiatkowski sparked further controversy on Tuesday by sharing a list of sacked employees on LinkedIn. More than 560 staff, including about 27 from the UK, had voluntarily added their names to the list, which was created by a fellow employee in order to help sacked co-workers find new jobs.
The chief executive wrote in the post that he had “mixed feelings” about the document: “While it symbolises much of what I am proud of among Klarna’s employees, it is also a tangible symbol of a very hard decision that saddens me deeply and will stay with me for a long period of time.
“If your company is lucky enough to recruit one of these fantastic people, I can assure you that it will be one of your biggest wins this year.”
However, commentators on LinkedIn criticised the chief executive’s post, saying it was “tone deaf”, while another said the creation of the list was “a clear sign of how poorly managed this ‘change’ has been implemented that has forced people to desperately post their contact details”.
“People can see through the bullshit,” one ex-staffer told the Guardian, while another said many staff had been “blindsided” by the job cuts, which followed a hiring spree that increased the company’s global headcount from 5,000 at the start of the year to more than 7,000. .
Sacked workers said the company was controversially offering more than double the pay to sacked US employees than its UK and European staff. However, they attempted to improve severance offers following an internal backlash – for example, by allowing staff to keep laptops and phones if they covered related tax.
One ex-employee described the process as chaotic. “Seems they make it up as they go,” they said.
Some affected staff had been hired only weeks or months earlier, and said there was little sense that their jobs were at risk. They said Klarna had expanded its office space in London, offered Uber Eats vouchers to staff and flown new hires to Stockholm for all-expenses paid induction programmes that could have been conducted online.
“The announcement came out of the blue but if I paid a bit more attention, could see it coming,” one said.
Ex-employees also accused the chief executive of using anti-union rhetoric, with Siemiatkowski having told staff last week that “the silent majority” preferred to deal directly with the company, rather than a union representative, when negotiating their exit terms. He also chastised staff for airing grievances about the process to the press.
“I’ll probably be financially fine, but it’s people who moved to Sweden or the UK, brought their kids here, are on work visas and been here for a month or a few weeks before their jobs were cut,” one sacked UK staffer said. “Now they only have a few months to get sponsored elsewhere … it’s pretty brutal for them to be honest.”
Klarna declined to comment.
