[tediousdemise]

When layoffs like this happen, I cringe for these companies and the poor souls who keep joining them. What HR really needs to do is a full retracement.

Who hired "X" employee, and why? Follow this up the chain. Follow it as far up as it needs to go, to the very email or slide deck from an upper-level exec whose failure of a pet project was greenlit to begin with. Fire the entire chain of command complicit in the lowest level employee's firing.

Truly, drain the entire swamp, otherwise the execs will keep making bad choices and playing music chairs while the boots on the ground get mutilated for them.

[r00fus]

This sounds like an expensive fishing expedition with limited upside for the organization & leadership.

Is it always the case that bad hires come from bad managerial decisions?

You might end up finding the entire ZIRP funding based thinking complicit.

[mr90210]

The issue appears to start from the funding model VCs often use where companies are incentivized to grow (in in headcount) as fast as they can to justify its current round of investment and then seek more, and then become a publicly traded company so that investors recoup their money, and the founders get even richer.

Sadly, none of these companies will likely do what you suggested because mass-hiring is just part of the game when there is too much money flowing into their accounts from VCs.