I'd take the article with a grain of salt, too, like many others replying to this thread. Even with a grain of salt, the topic sounds like stack ranking being re-packaged: There is a metric to let go of a certain percentage of employees per quarter or year.

When I worked for a US company in Canada, the upper management was open the fact that stack ranking was used. They said the bottom 2% should be gone every year. There would be a quarter every once a while that looks pretty "bleak". Then the office was allocated with "less" budget. At this point the managers picked a few people across different departments to fire. In a larger office, it's not a difficult task. The ones who regularly stole stationary for personal use, conduct side business during regular business hours or has outdated behaviours were picked. At the beginning of the next quarter, the job postings for those openings went up to the company's career page.

From the grapevine, over half of those people who were let go in this situation had difficulties finding comparable employment. The percentage sounds like a backdoor to get rid of the people who got hired because of some false positives. For that particular site of the company, these people would be let go even without stack ranking formally stated explicitly.