Purgers and hack-quisitions

You work for a small-to-medium-sized company, and you’re the ideal employee with outstanding performance reviews. Congratulations! Your small-fish company has just been gobbled up by a much larger one.

At last you don’t have to explain to people who your employer is, because everybody knows. It’s a household name. Salary and benefits are good. This could be your big break, the beginning of a stellar career that shoots you to the top of the corporate ladder. Or not.

Don’t rush out and get new headshots for your Forbes cover just yet.

You might glide into a long-term career with the new company, but update your resume and reactivate your network of contacts just the same. The corporate welcome sounds encouraging at first, and you will be tempted to believe it. But—guaranteed—all company communication comes right out of a playbook.

Huge companies acquire smaller ones for a number of reasons. Taking on hundreds (or thousands) of redundant employees is not one of them. It might not happen immediately, but within two or three years, staff will be reduced. Over time, fewer and fewer of your original colleagues will remain.

It’s easy to lay off an entire department of worker bees. Just reorganize, eliminate their job functions, and give everyone a token severance package. But middle managers making good salaries are a little more of a problem. The formula is: Assign them the dirty work (firing lower-level employees) and caution them not to say “I’m sorry” because it creates a potential vulnerability in case of litigation. They must tell the employee that the firing decision was theirs alone and they were not pressured by the company. Many managers don’t have the stomach for this. If some still won’t leave, axe them in the next round of layoffs.

So how do you survive if your company is acquired? Above all, don’t believe everything you hear. Here is the communications code for surviving a major acquisition:

We bought your company because we value all of you terrific people. [We bought you to get your client list, patents, infrastructure, customer base, wireless spectrum, to fill a hole in our product line, to remove you from the competition...]

We are not planning any personnel changes right now. [We’ll wait until the dust settles in order to minimize the bad press when we let most of you go. We have deep pockets and we can afford to wait.]

You’re part of our “family” now. [We never forget who came in through acquisitions. You'll always be last in line for promotions and salary increases. At least for twenty years or so.]

Every employee is valuable. [We don’t need duplications in Human Resources, Legal, Accounting, Marketing, Corporate Communications, Training, and many other support functions.]

We provide an environment of productivity and job satisfaction. [Please leave voluntarily. If you quit, it costs us nothing. So no more free coffee in the break room. No more holiday parties. We will ignore you. Move your office. Change your manager, your job description, the telecommuting policy—then change it back again—until you are off-balance and dissatisfied enough to quit.]

You now have a new position… an opportunity! [A decent interval has passed and you are being quietly demoted. The new job is a dead end and might even require you to relocate. It bears no resemblance to the job you were originally hired for, and it makes no use of your best skills or experience. You can accept it or quit. You will not be supported and your performance reviews will suffer. That gives us a “declining performance” dossier on you, in case you sue us when we eventually fire you.]

Big companies are practical. Cutting staff makes the bottom line look better. Are their methods heartless? Demeaning? Absolutely, but they’re textbook. They are only doing what big companies do—like animals in the wild. Lions don’t anesthetize the wildebeests, they simply eat them. Just business.

To survive, remember:

Take charge of your own career.
Pay attention to what the company does, not what it says.
Reinvent yourself, be flexible and resourceful.
Market yourself within the company, outside your original department.
Keep looking for opportunities outside the company.
Network, network, network.

Congratulate yourself if you survive an acquisition, but don’t let it destroy you if you don’t. Burn no bridges. Learn all you can and make as many contacts as possible. If you see the handwriting on the wall, put yourself in the best position to leave on your own terms—with another job lined up.

That big-name company will always look good on your resume.