{"id":732577,"date":"2026-04-16T17:39:24","date_gmt":"2026-04-16T17:39:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/732577\/"},"modified":"2026-04-16T17:39:24","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T17:39:24","slug":"epics-head-of-hr-is-out-less-than-a-month-after-mass-layoffs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/732577\/","title":{"rendered":"Epic’s Head Of HR Is Out Less Than A Month After Mass Layoffs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Epic Games<\/a> has parted ways with its chief people officer, Monika Fahlbusch. The c-suite change comes less than a month after the Fortnite maker announced mass layoffs affecting over 1,000 employees.<\/a><\/p>\n

The company confirmed that Fahlbusch\u2019s last day was April 15 but declined to elaborate on why she was leaving or whether she was fired. The HR executive joined Epic back in December 2020 after spending the previous two years as chief people officer at Juul Labs, the company whose mission it is to \u201ctransition the world\u2019s billion adult smokers away from combustible cigarettes.\u201d Fahlbusch did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

As Epic\u2019s head of HR, Fahlbusch would have had a key role in executing the company\u2019s latest round of downsizing. The second wave of mass layoffs since 2023 took many rank-and-file staff at the company by surprise.\u00a0\u201cWe are mindful of the difficulties that this layoff poses to employees and the community,\u201d Fahlbusch wrote in a letter to the Department of Commerce for North Carolina, where the company is headquartered, when the layoffs were announced.<\/p>\n

The cuts included one employee suffering from terminal brain cancer<\/a> whose family risked losing out on his life insurance as a result. CEO Tim Sweeney later said Epic would be in contact with the family and fix the insurance issue. The cofounder faced widespread blowback<\/a> for the layoffs, which he blamed in part on a costly anti-trust legal crusade.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the coming days, employers will see a stream of resumes of once-in-a-lifetime quality folks,\u201d he wrote in March. \u201cAn important thing to understand is that Epic never lowered our hiring standards as we grew, and the layoff wasn\u2019t a performance-based \u2018rightsizing\u2019 as companies call it nowadays.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last week, Bloomberg reported<\/a> that the company is currently pinning its financial recovery to a $1.5 billion partnership with Disney, which includes work on an extraction shooter featuring Disney characters. It also detailed some people\u2019s alleged concerns around chief operating officer Dan Vogel reportedly rushing projects and occasionally cursing at employees meetings.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is just not true,\u2019\u2019 senior director of global communications Liz Marksman told the publication<\/a>. \u201cMeetings at Epic are directed at discussing and debating plans and ideas.\u201d She added that while Vogel \u201cdrives our ambitious timelines,\u201d Bloomberg was \u201cconflating cursing for emphasis with cursing at people. The latter is not tolerated at Epic and is not behavior exhibited by Daniel Vogel.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Epic Games has parted ways with its chief people officer, Monika Fahlbusch. The c-suite change comes less than…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":732578,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[7],"tags":[16624,158,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-732577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-epic-games","tag-technology","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116415612739160961","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=732577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732577\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/732578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=732577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=732577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=732577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}