Post Pandemic Layoffs

Business Insider published an article earlier this week about how difficult it’s been for so many people to find work after the massive layoffs that happened since 2022. It’s paywalled so you’ll need a subscription but I’ll post some excerpts.

One reason it’s become harder is that even though layoffs remain tepid and the unemployment rate is low, the number of job openings in the US has fallen back to levels not seen since early 2021.

“If you’re looking to find a job right now, it’s much tougher than it was two years ago,” Nick Bunker, the director of North American economic research at Indeed, told BI.

Sometimes companies post job vacancies but don’t really mean to hire people because they don’t have the budget or can’t allocate headcounts. So why the hell are they posting them?

“We’re in a market right now that’s very cautious and conservative,” he said. “That company may have a need, and they’re posting to see what they can get, but they maybe don’t have the budget or the final approval to actually hire that person until maybe next year.”

That’s Jason Henninger, managing director at Heller Search, a recruiting firm focused on the tech industry. Basically some companies are looking to see what talents are available and try to figure out what sort of hiring strategies they can come up with given their own constraints.

I posted the following on Mastodon a couple of days ago,

Getting a new job in this economy is tough. There are people who have been unemployed for more than a year, sometimes longer than two, who can’t make their way back to regular employment anymore regardless of the additional training or certifications that they took because of job cuts and redundancies.

During the pandemic companies overhired and created new divisions and goals that no longer exist anymore because, “hey, we’re back to normal now!” And so many companies refuse to take the lessons of the pandemic while workers were counting on them.

The disconnect is real and maybe the only remedy is industry swap. Go into a whole new different thing. That’s what I’m having to do. I can’t do journalism or professional blogging anymore.

The main point there is the disconnect between corporate behavior and workers’s expectations. The old corpo heads are pushing to a full return to pre-pandemic work environment but workers have had a taste of freedom of choice and being able to work according to their needs. Unfortunately while it seemed like it was a worker’s market during the pandemic because they were in high demand, it quickly reversed once the pandemic was ending and companies started shedding those hires.

What’s more nefarious is the way they let go of their workers. This infamous one from end of 2021 was especially cruel. Better.com CEO called a meeting with 900 employees over Zoom and everyone on that call got told they were fired effective immediately. Any sense of empathy that the CEO might have communicated was immediately extinguished with the way he told everyone in the call that they were suddenly unemployed.

“This isn’t news that you’re going to want to hear but ultimately it was my decision and I wanted you to hear it from me. It’s been a really, really challenging decision to make. This is the second time in my career that I’m doing this and I do not want to do this. The last time I did it I cried. This time I hope to be stronger. But we are laying off about 15% of the company for [a number of] reasons: the market, efficiency and performances and productivity.

“If you’re on this call you are part of the unlucky group that is being laid off. Your employment here is terminated. Effective immediately.”

Consciously or not he made it all about him and how difficult it was for him to do it but letting employees go is never about the leader or how they feel, nobody gives a shit about management and especially not about the CEO. It’s about the employees and how it affects them.

The only thing that might make retrenched employees feel better would be the severance package and how they’re treated post employment. Some companies let former employees keep their insurance for a period of time, sometimes office facilities and amenities are still available in some capacity to help give them a softer landing. How the layoff is conveyed is important but post employment rights are far more meaningful.