25 June 2022
Recent college graduates in the United States are facing the loss of job offers in the technology industry.
Losing job offers is especially damaging at this time of year. The graduates say they are now prevented from seeking jobs at companies like Meta Platforms, Google and some other large technology companies. Those companies have already hired new college-level workers for the year.
Over the last week of May, Twitter called a group of young people who had received job offers from the social media company. In the calls, the company revoked, or took back, the job offers in 15-minute calls. Some of the people who received the calls told reporters about them.
Iris Guo described the call to the Reuters news agency. Guo graduated from the University of Waterloo in Canada. She studied financial management and computer science.
Guo, who lives in Toronto, received the bad news in a video call. She said the experience "was traumatic." Since then, she has raced to find new employment in order to secure her U.S. work visa.
Lucas Durrant is an electrical engineering graduate from Canada. He was ready to start his new job as a software engineer at Bolt, an online sales company. While on vacation a few weeks ago, he received an email stating that his offer was being taken back. Bolt announced it would begin job cuts in late May. The company blamed economic conditions.
More than 21,500 tech workers in the United States have lost their jobs so far this year. That information comes from Layoffs.fyi, a website that follows job cuts.
Reuters news agency looked at posts on LinkedIn and Google spreadsheets set up to help people who lost job offers. Reuters found that at least 40 recent college graduates had lost job offers in the past few weeks.
As of Tuesday, 22 recent graduates were listed on a spreadsheet as having offers taken back by Twitter. Nine people were listed on a separate spreadsheet for digital money trading company Coinbase.
In a statement, Twitter said it admitted that the revoked offers could put candidates in a difficult position. The company said it is offering payments to those affected.
Coinbase said in a blog post from June 2 that the decision to take back a number of job offers was not easy. It said the move was "necessary to ensure we are only growing in the highest-priority areas."
Graduates who spoke with Reuters said they were surprised by the amount of help they have been offered. Still, the pain of losing their dream jobs has remained.
One recent college graduate was ready to join Coinbase. He said Coinbase sent him an email saying the company did not plan to take back existing offers a week before he lost his job offer. The graduate did not want to be named because of his ongoing job hunt.
"I was disappointed for a few reasons. I didn't think leadership would make that decision," he said.
Brian Kropp oversees research for human resources at Gartner's, a research company. Kropp said that while the technology companies may be saving money in the short term, they risk damage to their reputation.
"Just think about how unfair that is to people you're rescinding the offer from," he said. "You're putting them in a painful situation."
I'm John Russell.
Sheila Dang reported on this story for Reuters. John Russell adapted it for VOA Learning English.
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Words in This Story
graduate – n. a person who has earned a degree or diploma from a school, college, or university
hire –v. to give a person a job
traumatic – adj. causing someone to become very upset
priority – n. something that is more important than other things and that needs to be done or dealt with first
reputation – n. the way in which people think of someone or something
rescind – v. to officially end a law, contract, or agreement; to say officially that something is no longer being offered