Publicity makes layoffs personal. How to leverage that
When layoffs become news or go viral, laid off employees and prospective hiring managers both benefit. Given that most downsizes lurk in the dark, how can we shed some light?
Big rounds of layoffs at high-growth, high-profile tech companies make the news every year. In 2017 there was SoundCloud, Tesla was an example in 2018, and in more recent memory — Uber and WeWork. We are seeing a peculiar trend in which, perhaps emboldened by the publicity of the layoffs, individuals or groups of employees choose to share publicly and open up about their job loss and subsequent job search.
In the cases of SoundCloud and Uber, affected employees self-published a spreadsheet containing their somewhat sensitive, highly-personal contact information, in an effort to get their names out to recruiters who were — due to the publicity of the layoff — already on the lookout for talent. These initiatives went viral, resulting in even more news coverage, leads and opportunities, and even an emerging talent initiative called Jybboom by Michael Houck.
After one door shuts unexpectedly, there is often a silver lining of many doors opening. Not all ends badly for people who were otherwise satisfied with their tech opportunities but thrust into a change without asking for one.
So why doesn’t this happen for every layoff? How come it’s only when we see people self-posting their personal emails and phone numbers that the press and internet masses choose to share? More downsizes are unfortunately and inevitably right around the corner. How can we engineer publicity about layoffs given that we know they will happen, and help both job candidates and recruiters benefit from the connection that virality brings?
At Layoff-Aid, we think the secret is vulnerability. Post-layoff publicity becomes effective when it becomes personal; when people choose to show vulnerability which Brené Brown says is a powerful tool for social connection. Job seekers and recruiters connect with the authenticity behind layoff news, and that’s when they’re most likely to feel energized to pursue new connections they might otherwise miss. There is a golden hour around layoffs. It is that moment, while the pan is hot, that we need to emulate in order to jump-start the job search process for employees who have been laid off not only from big-name companies, but across the entire tech sector.
How? Spotlights and press are highly effective at generating leads for groups and for individuals. As counter-intuitive and terrifying as it may seem, we think coverage can and should be triggered deliberately by:
- Groups of laid off employees who self-organize their contact info into spreadsheets and share them with their networks and on social media.
- Individuals who post about their own layoff stories while maintaining positive attitudes about the experience that just ended.
Sharing this news is, of course, conditional on those individuals feeling comfortable to be publicly vulnerable — to share the news of their layoff in the first place, and then to be prepared for their “gap” in employment to be documented for all to see, given that hiring processes take time. And that’s not even accounting for the risks of publishing private contact info like email or phone number on the internet for all to see (we recommend setting up a new, single-purpose email address and forwarding that to an actual monitored email account). For job-seekers willing and able to be vulnerable, though — and we acknowledge not everyone can — we think this can be a worthwhile risk.
That said, the fear is powerful… so powerful in fact that even though I have personally been downsized from not one but two tech companies, I never posted explicitly about losing my job and looking for a new one, because I thought it might handicap that very search. Going forward, if I ever get laid off again, I do hope I’ll have the courage to simply post about it to my networks and see if it makes my search even easier.
Hiring managers and recruiters play an important role in encouraging vulnerability because they have the power to demonstrate to candidates that it pays off. They can build the infrastructure for speedy recruitment processes that kick into gear after a layoff event. Solutions like Layoff-Aid for Hiring exist to help talent sourcers connect with exclusive talent, and the platform itself gets more valuable and effective as more individuals and hiring startups choose to work together.
Layoffs are a reality of a healthy startup ecosystem given that most startups fail. There is no need to sweep ourselves under the rug and hide the news in late-night calls. Let’s create a new culture around layoffs, one where we don’t just hide the tech industry’s underbelly, but make the startup ecosystem stronger when we share individual circumstances, group layoffs, and industry data openly and publicly.
