How do you personally cope with being laid off?

October 16, 2022 2:58 AM

I’m frustrated as I have been laid off again because of the economy. I do wonder if there is a chance that layoffs are a way to get rid of people that aren’t great but not bad enough to fire.

I feel devastated as I’m having a very hard time keeping a job. Others in my team have been able to stay while I was the only one laid off. I liked my job a lot however there were times when I admit I was very distracted. I’ve been able to get a job very quickly in the past after being laid off/fired but I’m not so sure if I’ll get so lucky this time. I have received a severance and told that it was not performance based. However I know that’s something that HR has to say to cover their legal bases. I’m scared that future employers will look down upon my multiple layoffs.

posted by sheepishchiffon to Human Relations (12 answers total)

What is your field/industry? Some of my friends seem to get laid off all the time and that’s just how it is in their field.
posted by slkinsey at 4:09 AM on October 16, 2022 [4 favorites]

Layoffs happen. It can be related to your comparative performance, it can be related to your pay/benefits (higher-paid people are sometimes more at risk), it can be related to your relationship to your manager, or it might just be bad luck. There's no way to tell, and hiring managers, I think, know that. Especially in a weird-ass and potentially tanking economy, I wouldn't expect you to face any consequences in future interviews for being laid off.
posted by restless_nomad at 5:17 AM on October 16, 2022 [4 favorites]

I got laid off in 2009 and felt the same way you do. They claimed it wasn’t a reflection of performance (the owner of the company even wrote me a really nice recommendation on LinkedIn), but I was getting increasingly frustrated with my role, and that in turn led to management getting increasingly frustrated with me.

Ultimately, I came to view that layoff as a positive. I needed the change. I could’ve said the same thing about the job: it wasn’t great but wasn’t bad enough to quit. I did find another job soon after, and that job sucked too, but eventually I started getting better jobs, and I’m not sure I would’ve had the motivation to do that if I hadn’t been laid off. I would’ve just stayed there and felt stuck. So for me, I’m glad it happened. It’s kind of a shitty way to do someone a favor, but with the benefit of hindsight I see that’s what it was.

Also, find the humor. When the HR guy welcomed me into his office for the layoff paperwork, he said “howdy”, which, over 13 years later, still strikes me as exactly the wrong thing to say. Do you really want to work for someone who says “howdy” to people they’re making unemployed?
posted by kevinbelt at 5:23 AM on October 16, 2022 [4 favorites]

Layoffs are more common in certain industries, I've found. I worked for several years in the financial industry as an administrative assistant - it was just by chance, I kept getting sent to banks as a temp and after a few years I just accepted that as my fate. But I also got laid off a LOT, especially after the 2009 recession - at one point I had a 2-year run in one place, and they did 3 rounds of layoffs during that 2 years where they wiped out about 20 people in my office each time (the second time they cut one of my own bosses), and then one of those rounds of layoffs finally cut me (and 20 other people in our office too).

That's when I finally said "no more" to finance jobs and made sure to tell the temp agency that when I went back to them.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:36 AM on October 16, 2022

When I got laid off, I used it as an opportunity to start up my own business. The layoff payout worked out to be six months of living if I controlled my expenses (which was made easier due to not commuting and not eating lunch at restaurants five days per week). So I gave myself six months to get the business up and running. After almost a decade, I still had money in the corporate account to cover payroll at the end of the month, when I got a job offer at what was near my peak consulting rate, and which involved a lot fewer headaches, so I shut my business down.

One of the things that I found was that my business did better during “tough” economies. Companies that didn’t want to hire full-time employees were more than happy to hire a consultant that they could get off the books on a month’s notice.

I don’t think employers will look down on your layoffs. Far more important to them will be how you dealt with the layoffs. Using it as an opportunity to start a business or get more training (depending on the size of the severance) makes it a positive.

Best of luck! At a minimum, I strongly recommend taking a little time to think about what your options are. In a lot of industries there are labor shortages. Can you use that to put yourself in a stronger position long-term?
posted by DaveP at 5:46 AM on October 16, 2022

Without knowing more about your industry or the employer in question, it really is so hard to say. I am not in HR, but due to my role I've been privy, indirectly, to decisionmaking processes re: layoffs, negotiated severance, etc., and I have participated in hiring committees on a semiregular basis. There can be WAYYYY more to a decision like this than actual performance. Like:
- Bob, Mary, and Chris are all in a department that's being downsized. Management has to decide who will go, or at least who goes first.
- Mary has X skill or Y institutional knowledge that it'd be hard to replace. So on that criterion alone, they decide they need to keep Mary.
- Based on past interactions between Bob and management, they sense he'd try to pursue legal action if he were let go (legit or not legit, could be management having acted badly and not Bob just being litigious, but that doesn't matter to the bosses, the point is he could be a pain in the ass).
- Chris is fine, or even awesome, but he lacks Mary's specialist knowledge and Bob's lawsuit potential, so it's gonna be him because that's what's easiest for the people in charge.

This is just one, highly fictionalized, version of a million possible scenarios where the person/people being let go have no control over some highly variable, very opaque decisionmaking criteria, and will probably never find out about it. Hiring managers know this, and the smart ones don't consider a layoff a strong signal either way when considering a candidate.
posted by TinyChicken at 5:49 AM on October 16, 2022 [10 favorites]

It is impossible for us to know. However, another possibility I've seen is choosing the person to lay off based on who is good enough and hirable enough that managers figure they will be fine, they can get another job. Whereas some of the other roughly equal workers (or maybe even not quite as good) might struggle based on age or location restrictions, etc.

I bring this up not because I can know your situation, but because when I was laid off I found it was hard Not to see it as a reflection on me (though they, of course, assured me it was not, and with distance I know it wasn't). But at the time I found it helpful to focus on the many ways the layoff could have been about anything else - it helped me to move on (to, eventually, much better jobs).

I also have only seen hiring managers care about layoffs if there was a pattern of very short tenures (like 6 months) at several jobs with layoffs. If that's not you, or if there are good explanations, go forth and job search, confident in your own abilities.
posted by ldthomps at 7:34 AM on October 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

And more on the "how do I cope" side of things, layoffs suck. If you're fired for cause, you can often see it coming, but layoffs are usually - not always, but usually - an out-of-the-blue thing. You don't get to wrap up your work, you don't get a going-away party, you don't get to take some time to plan your financial situation. Severance is nice but never enough, and only if you're lucky do you get a grace period to jam in whatever doctor/dentist appointments you can before your insurance goes away.

So be kind to yourself! It's ok to be upset and rattled. It's ok to use this space to do some thinking about what kind of work you want and can succeed in. Hit up your network for job leads, reach out to your friends for support - it can be a shocking change to suddenly not be around people all day - take some time to (privately!) complain about it. I've only been laid off once, in the gentlest possible way, but I worked in an industry where they were routine, and it's hard enough on everyone that I still have a straight-up trauma reaction when a layoff hits my friends.
posted by restless_nomad at 7:55 AM on October 16, 2022 [4 favorites]

Sometimes the person with the least seniority in a group is by default the first one to get laid off when cuts have to be made (this is sometimes even enforced by union rules). Unfortunately that means that the person who got laid off from their previous job most recently is the most likely to get laid off again.
posted by heatherlogan at 3:46 PM on October 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

I was made redundant in 2017. The thing I found really helped was having a goal that I was working towards.

Now, I had some advantages: I worked in a heavily unionised workplace so I got a good severance payout, my whole department was being made redundant so it wasn't personal, and we were given advance notice so we could make plans.

I used it as an opportunity to rethink my career. I ended up enrolling in a Master of Library Information Science degree, and I am now a qualified and employed librarian. Like I said, having a goal meant I was less stressed about my immediate circumstances because I could see it as a step on journey to what I really wanted.

I'll also add that employers were impressed by the fact that I had a career goal and was actively working towards it. I genuinely think it helped get me jobs.
posted by davidwitteveen at 4:48 PM on October 16, 2022

I’ve had terrible luck (in some ways) over my 25+ years post-graduate school. Fired and laid off more times than I care to say, took me three years to get back to work after being laid during the dot bomb era. All I can say is even when the manager making the decision said it was me, most often it was due to factors out of my control. Generally I dealt with it by leaning on support of friends and family, finding something not job search related to occupy my mind, and treating the search itself as a job.

Good luck!
posted by billsaysthis at 7:52 PM on October 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

As a manager we always knew layoffs were coming when we were asked to identify our "bottom 10%". It was always kind of brutal because you had found and hired these people and usually the bottom 10% contained people who were still pretty good. It was a common joke among low-level managers that everyone should hire one goofball on their team so there would be someone to cut.

However, something that may be more strongly affecting you is "Last In, First Out" policies. This is a relatively common model where it is assumed that the more recently hired people are less vital to keeping continuity through layoffs. It’s a nasty cycle for people who get laid off and are therefore going to be the newest person at their next company when layoffs come up.

Unless you find out otherwise I would assume this is what is happening to you. When word comes down to cut people you’re first on the chopping block due to lack of tenure.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 5:52 AM on October 17, 2022