Switch: Our response to the COVID-19 and our first conclusions

Since the virus outbreak, we’ve seen an important number of layoffs across all countries and industries; startups have been announcing letting go of thousands of employees; while other companies have started hiring in mass.

We are no exception. Having launched Wanted a few months ago, we didn’t see this coming; we managed to get quite an enthusiastic tech crowd on Product Hunt, start seeing traction on our platform and raise interest from our first users.
But the coronavirus tornado didn’t just hit a few of us; our friends back in Europe started to lose their jobs, some others got furloughed, our investors started circulating advice documentation from their bankrupted portfolio companies, and most of all we started worrying about the current situation.

We knew something had to be made; 3.3 million Americans already filed for unemployment benefits in March, it is said that more than 30% of American will be losing their job due to the health crisis and this is just the beginning of an economic recession that is going to hit hard, very hard.

We’ve started seeing lists of talent with all their data and contact details disclosed to the public circulating on the web. This is a quite common process in our startup ecosystem, although inefficient and easily hijacked by some headhunters that managed to get their hands on it, which we also happened to do when we had to lay off our talented staff.

To overcome the inefficiency and improve things, we’ve created Switch — Wanted’s team answer to COVID-19. A 100% free platform to help struggling startups send their laid-off talent to top startups that are still looking to hire.

Since the launch of Switch, early April, more than 10,000 ex-employees have signed up on the platform, and we’re counting more than 750 companies laying off and more than 250 companies are still hiring.

Industries and Roles laying off

Roles impacted by COVID-19

Source: Switch Data

• The Marketing & Sales departments got hit hard by the health crisis; this fact can be explained by the reduction of marketing spending and slow down of the economy which directly impact sales.
• IT and Product Development departments have also been impacted by the crisis. Although more essential to companies core teams, larger teams represent and important investment in companies that can be too costly for larger companies.
• The rest of roles on the platform are a mix of the recruiting industry roles (8%) which are directly impacted by the economy and broader roles in Business development (10%).

The platform doesn’t accept roles that are not in the Product development field, Marketing and sales field as well as the HR field — This chart only represents the breakdown between roles accepted on the Switch platform.

Industries impacted by COVID-19

Source: Switch Data

Switch has collected laid off talent from more than 750 companies across Europe and the US in the fields mentioned above.

Based on this data, we’ve looked into the industries of companies laying off that are on Switch. Unsurprisingly, the travel industry, hospitality and real estate are the most impacted by the coronavirus outbreak.

We are also seing the transportation and recruiting industries directly impacted by the current situation as we hear about companies such as Bird, Uber, Sonder and also ZiRecruiter as well as Lever laying off talented staff.

We’re addressing this platform for all CEOs and Head of People that have to do this difficult move but still care about the fate of their talent they’re letting go.

The process is fairly simple;

Landing page on Switch, you can either sign-in yourself or upload a list as a company.

• Upload your list of laid off talent on Switch after creating an account. You can do this by simply uploading your excel spreadsheet and ensuring the fields are correctly filled up.

Upload of talent on Switch. Follow the template and upload a CSV or XLS. It will send a permission request to all of them.

• Once that’s done, we’re sending an email to each of your laid off to get permission to send them connections with companies willing to start a recruitment process with them.
• The list can be either publicly or privately shared. No information is disclosed unless the talent agrees to get his details shared with us.
• We check each of the startups on Switch to ensure only top ones can hire your talent. This is a free platform so no headhunter can get advantage of it.

You can follow up how many requested and accepted introductions have been made to your ex-employees.

• As a caring CEO or Head of People you’ll be able to follow up on the progress of your ex-employees to ensure they find a new “home”.

If you’re a company laying off or still hiring feel free to sign-up on Swtch.us to access top talent for free.