Why Are Junior Employees Always First to Go?

I’ve spent 17 years in org transformation. I’ve seen more layoff lists than I can count.

The outside world hears a fairy tale: “Survival of the fittest.” What I see is different. It’s a precise game played between Severance Budget and Headcount Target.

Today, I want to talk about the logic the C-Suite will never say out loud.

1. The Awkward Math

Every downsizing starts with the same irony: the headcount target is high, but the severance budget is tight.

The CEO announces: “We need to reduce headcount by 20%.” Finance nods and allocates a severance pool. But here’s what nobody says in the town hall: that pool is never big enough to hit 20% if you’re cutting expensive people.

Let me show you the math.

Say your severance policy is N+3 (one month per year of service, plus three months). A middle manager with 12 years of tenure and a 40K monthly salary costs you 600K to let go. That’s one person.

A junior employee with 2 years of tenure and a 12K salary? 60K. One-tenth the cost.

For the price of one middle manager, you can exit ten juniors.

When the CFO is staring at a fixed budget and a headcount target, the decision makes itself. Juniors aren’t cut because they underperform. They’re cut because they’re affordable.

This is what I call the Severance Efficiency Ratio. Nobody talks about it. Everyone calculates it.

So we start with juniors. Not because they’re not good. Because they’re cheap. To hit the headcount number, juniors become mathematical sacrifices.

Helpless, but necessary.

2. The Middle Management Trap

Once the juniors are gone, the real game begins.

At first, middle managers breathe a sigh of relief. They survived the first wave. They still have their titles, their teams (what’s left of them), their office seats.

But within weeks, reality hits.

All that work juniors used to handle doesn’t disappear. Spreadsheets. Data reconciliation. Formatting slides. Chasing approvals. Booking meetings. Pulling reports. It all flows upward.

What happens next is a workplace spectacle: Middle Management Regression.

Managers who haven’t touched Excel in years are suddenly wrestling with VLOOKUP. They’re formatting PowerPoint decks at midnight, pixel by pixel. They’re copying and pasting invoice numbers into finance systems, a task they haven’t done since their first job out of university.

Their skills have rusted. High title, clumsy hands.

And here’s the cruel part: they can’t admit they’re struggling. They’re supposed to be leaders. Asking for help feels like exposing weakness. So they suffer in silence, working 14-hour days doing work that used to take a junior four hours.

Combined with a sudden spike in working hours, their psychological defenses crack within two months. I’ve seen it happen faster.

That’s when HR appears with open arms.

The HRBP schedules a “check-in.” They express concern. They offer support. But hidden behind that hug is a PIP, or Performance Improvement Plan.

This is the kill shot.

A PIP sounds reasonable on paper. Improve your performance in 60 days. Hit these targets. Attend these trainings. But a middle manager already drowning in grunt work has no bandwidth to complete a PIP. They’re barely keeping their head above water with daily tasks. Adding a performance improvement plan on top is like asking someone to train for a marathon while they’re running from a fire.

The ending writes itself: collapse in humiliation, or “voluntarily” resign before failing the PIP.

Most choose to resign. Pride makes the decision for them.

For the company? Voluntary resignation = zero severance.

Far cheaper than a direct layoff. And completely legal.

3. The Senior Leader Trap

Juniors gone. Middle managers broken. Are senior leaders safe?

They don’t paste invoices, after all. They have executive presence. They golf with the CEO.

Naive.

This is when the Compliance team, usually gathering dust in the corner, polishes its sniper scope.

On normal days, Compliance has nowhere to place its ambition. They write policies nobody reads. They send reminder emails everyone ignores. They’re the hall monitors of the corporate world, tolerated but never celebrated.

During a downsizing? This is their moment to shine.

Senior leaders hold power. And power means decisions. To push business forward, to close deals, to hit targets, they often cut corners on process. They approve expenses that should go through committee. They sign contracts without full legal review. They take clients to dinners that stretch the entertainment policy. They hire vendors who happen to be old friends.

In peacetime, we call this “agile flexibility.” Getting things done. Moving fast. Leadership.

During a layoff? It makes them sitting ducks.

Dig deep enough and you’ll always find something. An undeclared dinner. A non-compliant expense. An unauthorized approval. A conflict of interest that was never formally disclosed.

The Compliance team knows exactly where to look. They’ve been keeping notes for years.

Once Compliance catches it, the conversation changes completely. It’s no longer a layoff discussion. It’s not about severance packages or transition support.

It’s Termination For Cause.

Zero severance. Sometimes worse: clawback of bonuses, legal exposure, reputation damage.

The same “flexibility” that made them successful becomes the evidence that ends their career.

The Full Picture

Now you understand.

Juniors aren’t just first to go because they’re junior. Their departure is strategic. It pulls out the foundation so the upper floors collapse on their own.

This is “Zero-Cost Downsizing”:

• Juniors sacrificed to budget math

• Middle managers broken by skill regression

• Senior leaders taken out by Compliance

Three layers. Three different methods. One objective: minimize severance spend while maximizing headcount reduction.

I’m not here to judge. I’ve been part of this system. But I do think professionals deserve to know how the game is played, before they’re caught in it.

Sometimes, the company doesn’t want to give you anything at all.