-At a former employer, the upper management managed to one-up this by telling those of us still working there that we were the damaged goods; during an all-hands meeting where it was announced that we were to acquire a competitor, our CFO managed to blurt that
'We've learned from past acquisitions, and this time we will ensure that the onboarding experience is a good one. We can not and will not end up with a repeat of our former acquisition, where the bulk of the people we were interested in, left...'
Oh, for the usual reason, I guess. When the acquired company was to be integrated into ours, lots of effort was expended on stating that the new company would try to take the best bits of both companies to make us even better yada yada - after which, any project they'd been working on was promptly killed off, to be replaced by projects we had been working on. HR then promptly proceeded to maim any and all agreements between the old company and the unions, after which pay grades were 'harmonized', which basically meant that all employees of both the aquisitor and the acquisitee (if those are even words...) found themselves taking a pay cut.
The only thing which made me stay on for a couple more years was that we had a couple of customers which were an absolute delight to work with. They are now customers of my current employer and still a delight to work with.
Sorry that was a rhetorical comment, meant to imply that the top performers understood what the current management was like and noped the hell out of there
Thank you. I figured as much, but I will admit if still irks me a bit how what was mostly a good company was run into the ground, so whenever I am given half a chance, I vent. :/
'We've learned from past acquisitions, and this time we will ensure that the onboarding experience is a good one. We can not and will not end up with a repeat of our former acquisition, where the bulk of the people we were interested in, left...'
I wish I was making this up.