Better.com, that fired 900 employees on Zoom call, announces 3,000 more lay-offs

Better.com, the online-mortgage lending company that fired 900 employees over a Zoom call in December, announced n Tuesday that it is laying off over 3,000 more employees.

The company said it is “reducing workforce in both the US and India in a substantial way”.

In a letter posted on Better’s website on Tuesday, Better.com’s interim president Kevin Ryan said the layoffs were prompted by a “dramatic drop in origination volume due to rising interest rates”.

“Unfortunately, that means we must take the difficult step of streamlining our operations further and reducing our workforce in both the US and India in a substantial way,” Ryan said.

“This decision is driven heavily by the headwinds affecting the residential real estate market,” Kevin Ryan.

The “affected employees will be eligible for a minimum of 60 working days, and as much as 80 working days, of cash severance payments”, Reuters quoted Better.com’s interim chief as saying.

They will also be eligible for extended medical benefits, severance and a “suite of services” to help them find a new job, CNN reported on Wednesday.

The online-mortgage lending company, Better.com, made headlines in December last year when a video showed its CEO Vishal Garg firing 900 employees from his company over a Zoom call.

As the video went viral, Vishal Garg apologised for his manner of handling layoffs at the mortgage company. Later, he decided to take time off from the company while it conducts a “leadership and cultural assessment”.

“Potentially” avoiding another public relations disaster like the one that followed CEO Vishal Garg’s decision to conduct a mass firing over Zoom, Better.com said that affected employees will be notified personally over the phone, CNN reported.

However, some workers were unintentionally notified of their firing after seeing a severance payment in Better’s internal payroll system or in their bank accounts prior to the official announcement, several reports said.

“This was certainly not the form of notification that we intended and stemmed from an effort to ensure that impacted employees received severance payments as quickly as possible,” a person familiar with the glitch was quoted as saying.