“You’re just a dime a dozen”

What you say matters…

I was sitting in an interview room, it was small, just enough to fit a small square table and 2 chairs and it was hot, ridiculously hot for an office building. The building had turned the heat on already, but it was a hot day late fall. I didn’t get one of the nicer rooms because I was a junior recruiter at the time. Because it was a small windowless room, sometimes my colleagues would joke and call it the interrogation room. The heat made it that much worse.

I only had about 9 months of recruitment experience under my belt. I sat across from a man 20 years my senior, with 3 kids and he told me what the HR said to him as he was being laid off…

“You’re just a dime a dozen”

He said this while I can see him trying to hold his tears back. This is a man who’s been at the company for the past 15 years, worked his way up the company with lots of over time, going above and beyond whenever he can, and giving up time with his family to help the company out. He was in IT support, so the type of job that no one notices when everything is running well but everyone yells at when things break. A thankless role that he dutifully did very well for over 15 years.

As he was being laid off, along with many others at the time, that is what the Human Resources Manager said to him. That he was…