[rant] the tone deafness of the process is in the fact that the company is okay letting perfectly good people go for some self congratulatory metric. The company has a high interview bar, if I may claim so myself. So it's perfectly possible that all 5 people in a team are doing good work. But now you are forced to push someone out because "we only retain the best".

They are okay losing people, okay losing the investment done in them, okay losing the knowledge of systems they acquired for a rule someone in the HR made because they read a study on it. What a bunch of buffoons really.