Wave of Layoffs at Bee Talents as Tech Market Cools in Poland
There is a famous proverb about how one should be nice to people on your way up, as you’ll meet them on your way down. In the last few days one company looked like they might be on their way down. Rumours on the market suggest that Bee Talents has slimmed down its team by laying off more than 20 employees and contractors. Possibly up to 20% of the firm’s employees and contractors have had their contracts terminated. Are they on their way down together with the Polish Tech Market, or is this just a blip?
Firms like dotLinkers, Humeo, Bee Talents, and others have grown up around the booming tech market in Poland since the early 2010s. Some of them have won some large contracts in the market. Whilst others were acquired by companies like GI Group or Cornerstone Partners.
Where most industries have been consolidating, the tech recruitment landscape in Poland has done everything but. As an example, Magazyn Rekruter’s editorial team met with Aleksandra Pszczoła in November 2017. At the very beginning of the Poznan-based firms meteoric rise to the top.
The Tech Market was Hot in Poland
Bee Talents was kicked off back in 2015. The firm specialized in the tech sector. By the end of 2017 the firm had 12 recruitment consultants on board. Aleksandra shared with Magazyn Rekruter, in the interview, how the Turquoise Management Model was at the centre of everything that happened at Bee Talents.
Aleksandra was also an early entrant into the Women in Technology space in Poland. She appeared in a Geek Girls Carrot and Hays Women in IT Report in 2016. Aleksandra is not just any recruitment leader.
In 2017, Katarzyna Michalak of Bee Talents was decorated as the Runner Up Consultant of the Year 2017 Poland at Magazyn Rekruter’s Wieczor Rekrutera. Picking up an award as a 'Perly HR’ in Poland. With a jury of the leading HR Directors in Poland overseeing proceedings. Katarzyna still works with Aleksandra at Bee Talents today.
Karolina Sokołowska went a step further than Katarzyna, and was decorated as the Consultant of the Year for 2019. Karolina is another loyal member of the team at Bee Talents and has been working with Aleksandra continuously since 2017.
Leading by Example in Poland’s Tech Market
The Consultant of the Year Awards are not the only time that the prestigious tech recruitment firm has collaborated with Magazyn Rekruter. Last year Karolina Sokołowska shared her views with the leading Polish recruitment newswire:
Things were looking good. And by the end of 2022 Bee Talents had grown to well over 50 recruitment consultants. Some of them working on-site within client operations, others working in the Poznan office or remotely across Poland. A similar story to many successful entrepreneurs across Poland today.
However, things have become less promising for Bee Talents. In the last few days four of the team at Bee Talents have published on their LinkedIn profiles how they have been #Layoff’ed. There may be more in the weeks to come.
Global Tech Layoffs and Controversy at Twitter
Everything was looking good after COVID started to subside. The markets picked up, demand for technology specialists grew and tech recruiters were in demand. They still are. Some of them.
When Coinbase and other cryptocurrency firms in the U.S. started to lay off people there wasn’t much initial panic. The news of Apple, Facebook’s Meta and other tech giants making redundancies was something that was far away and didn’t affect Europeans, let alone Poles.
Even when Musk started to throw his weight around in Twitter. Pointing at the lack of profitability within the social media platform, nobody really worried. It would have been business as usual across Europe. Recruitment businesses in Poland were preparing for another bumper year of growth in 2023. Recruiting more people, building larger teams. Hopefully welcoming more clients.
But should that have been what was happening?
Aleksandra hasn’t done anything wrong. Normally global trends tend to have little effect on Poland, apart from Covid. And the news over the last few days doesn’t quite seem like the wave of #OpenToWork recruiters piling on to LinkedIn as was seen in March 2020. Today what we can observe is a trickle. The question is how large this trickle might grow…
Has Dublin become the pre-cursor of things to come for the Tech Market in Poland?
Reports of redundancies in Citrix, Twitter, Meta and Salesforce are prominent in the news. Especially if you live in Ireland. There are a lot of specialists employed in Dublin who support these Tech giants. However, in recent times, Meta alone have let go of 3,000 people in the Irish capital.
And that was in early November. Demand for supplying technology specialists was already starting to shrink. It took only a couple of months from when the portents of doom started to appear in the U.S. till Dublin felt the affects. Therefore it was only a matter of time before the large outsourcers with operations in Poland would feel the pinch. Which is what has happened at Bee Talents. And probably a lot of other firms that are not quite as transparent.
The question is who will be next? How many more recruiters across Poland will have #OpenToWork on their LinkedIn profiles over the next few weeks?
Today Bee Talents, tomorrow who? Hays? Randstad? Michael Page? HRK? Humeo? dotLinkers? Antal? Devire? GI Group? Spring? Experis?
Magazyn Rekruter reached out to Aleksandra but she didn’t respond to the request for commentary.
Author: Andy Samu
Andy Samu is the Editor of #DisruptionBanking based in London.
DisruptionBanking was listed as one of the Top 15 Fintech Magazines & Publications to Follow in 2022 globally.
Magazyn Rekruter does not take any responsibility for any of the content in this story. The content is the opinion of the writer. All the facts presented in the story are widely available on the internet. And there has been no persons or companies that this story was intended to harm or cause damage to.
