Everything Is Content Now. Even Your Layoff

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Last year, in January, Sylvia Duran woke up to something strange.

It was a Friday, and I was going to have a really busy day, so I immediately checked my phone to see what meetings I had that day, and I couldn't access my calendar.

Sylvia worked at Google. She had a high level role on a YouTube marketing team and had been there for nearly a decade. She assumed something was wrong with her phone.

Honestly, I thought that there was a bug, some kind of bug on my phone. It's happened sometimes.

Sylvia mentioned the issue to her husband at the time, who had a different take.

He told me, WHOA, isn't that a sign? And I said, a sign of what? And he said that you were laid off.

There had been some rumors about layoffs at YouTube, but Sylvia wasn't too worried. After all, the company was doing well money. Why would they lay people off?

I laughed it off. I said, no, that's not what's happening.

But that was exactly what was happening. Sylvia, along with twelve thousand of her colleagues across Google, had been let go. Sylvia says She was in shock.

It felt unreal and at the same time like all of my worst thoughts about myself had come true. That, of course I was selected to be laid off because I never belonged there in the first place.

Sylvia loved her job. She worked hard at it, and being part of the company with such a central part of her identity. Her mom even called her my mini Google.

They were really really proud of me, and I think that they were surprised because in theory, I was a strong performer, and so why does a strong performer lose their job.

As she started to process what had happened, she began cycling through emotions shock, sadness, shame.

I started a question for myself, why am I feeling this way? Why am I feeling so ashamed? And I wanted to talk about it. I'm someone who processes verbally, so I asked my brother, who has his own podcast. I told him would he be gained to record an episode where I just processed my feelings? Welcome to the One of a Kind Podcast. I recorded the first episode three days after I got laid off. I didn't think I was going to share it with the world.

But she did.

In her very first episode where she talked about her layoff and how it affected her.

After like almost a decade of my life there and the way that I went down, it was not a good experience, and I'm trying to process that.

Used to be if you got laid off, you didn't talk about it, You hit it, fibbed about it. Even not anymore. Now you start a podcast today on the show, the hottest new job market trend is posting publicly about your layoff, owning it, sharing it, and feeling your feelings in real time for the world to see what the shift in how we approach layoffs means for employees and employers everywhere. This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. Getting laid off isn't a new phenomenon.

Jack Welch, just kind of made the practice routine as a way to meet quarterly earnings targets and for financial reasons.

Jack Welch became the CEO of General Electric in nineteen eighty one, and when he started there, layoffs were pretty much a last resort for most companies. They were seen as a sign that a company was struggling or even failing. For Welch, though, layoffs became part of a proactive strategy. He would have all his employees ranked every year, and every year he would fire the bottom ten percent. He called it the vitality curve, and in his first few years at GE he laid off more than one hundred

The cost of labor is one of the highest costs on their balance sheet, and so it's something that executives are thinking about a lot in terms of how much they're spending on their workforce.

Layoffs are now just a reality of the American corporate workplace.

A professor that I talked to at Harvard Business School mentioned that part of the point of some of the layoffs now is to signal to investors that a company is serious about their cost cutting. So in that sense, they're signaling publicly as well, versus oftentimes in previous decades it was less so the case.

But how workers grappled with that reality change during COVID when layoffs hit their highest level in decades.

So, I mean the pandemic was a huge shift in this dynamic. We saw millions of people who were thrown out of work and it wasn't their fault, whereas you know in the before times, there was always kind of this idea that if you were laid off, it really was your fault in some way, even if it was a business driven decision and didn't have anything to do with you directly as a person in your performance at work. And so that I think was a massive change.

There was also the way people got laid off during the pandemic.

In decades past, you were in an office, you had to pack up your things, put them in a box, kind of walk out of the building or be walked out. It was public in a different way in front of your coworkers. Now sperience is completely different. You know, often it is on zoom and when you get that announcement and you shut your laptop, it's over, and you kind of don't have the same visceral feeling of closure that you might have had if you were in a physical office.

One way to combat that disembodied feeling was to share the experience with others, not just with your former work from home coworkers, but with the world. What were some of the signs that we were thinking about layoffs differently in the pandemic?

Yeah, I think you know. On LinkedIn, we started to see so many people posting about getting laid off, they were looking for work. LinkedIn released their open to Work banner, the kind of green banner that you see on people's profiles.

LinkedIn introduced it's green open to Work banner in June twenty twenty, and since then thirty three million people have used it. Suddenly, what could have once been seen as an embarrassment started to be publicly portrayed as something else entirely.

It was more maybe a badge of solidarity. It was we are all in this together, or so many of us are in this together, and those of us who are in that position. It became something that was collective in a way.

There it was the slim silver lining of all this workplace blood letting. The stigma around being laid off was fading. People weren't hiding it. They were talking about it, sharing struggles, asking for advice and connections.

It was just kind of showing what used to be a very very private, shameful moment and putting it out there to say, you know, this is what happened, and you know, implicitly it says, this isn't my fall.

The pandemic eventually ended and the economy came roaring back, but layoffs haven't gone away. What's different now is that layoff culture has been fundamentally changed. The stigma around layoffs is largely gone, and laid off workers are now eagerly bringing their stories and their frustration to social media. Workers like Britney Peach.

Hi Brittany Hi.

You may have seen Britney's video when it went viral in January. It starts with a caption POV You're about to get laid.

Off, thanks for meeting with me.

In the video, Brittany is sitting at home, leaning over her computer, listening as an HR rep for cloud Flare, the company where she worked, tells her she's being laid off. But instead of just listening in shock the way some people might do, Britney starts to push back.

Yeah, I'm stay right there.

Brittany asks the HR rep some pretty direct questions, Well.

Yeah, no, can you explain for me why Britney Peach is getting let go? Do you guys even know? Like why?

Like who you're talking to?

Each day?

She posted the video online and it got millions of us and thousands of comments, many cheering her on for standing up to the man.

So am I getting let go for no reason?

Which Joe says is how a lot of these TikTok layoff videos are getting received.

There is kind of a power that's being taken back there in terms of you know, I'm gonna own my story.

This morning at eight am, I got a last minute meeting invite titled business Update with my whole team, my manager, my manager's manager, and someone from HR. So I think we're all about to be laid off.

And this is what happened. Hello, I just got laid off. It wasn't anything personal, they said. It feels personal, and I'm going to keep moving forward and you can follow along on my journey and like and subscribe. Just overall really grateful for this experience and wish you guys the best.

Thank you guys. Guess I'm a full time influencer now.

Like, subscribe and maybe hire me? What employers think of all this after the break. So far this year, more than eleven million people have been laid off in the US, and the job market they're entering isn't easy. Friday's jobs report showed the economy added just one hundred and forty two thousand jobs in August, and recently, when the New York Fed asked workers if they expected to be unemployed in the next four months, more people than at any

Yeah, I mean, I think talking to recruiters, my sense is that it really depends on the nature of the things that you post. If you are posting about the fact that you were laid off, but you were framing it in a way, you know, this is what happened, and I'm looking for new opportunities, kind of spinning it in a positive way.

It could be like a cover letter itself.

It could be a cover letter. Yeah, you could use it as an opportunity to re engage and connect with your network and you know, just kind of showing this is what I'm looking for.

But Joe also says there's sometimes such a thing as too much honesty, and not all hiring managers view pass layoffs the same way.

There are other recruiters who feel very strongly that you should never admit that you've been laid off, that you should come up with another story, and it should be you know, I'm taking a career break, I'm taking a break to travel, and just don't use the L word at all.

The other thing about layoffs is that for many companies, it's not just a way to signal fiscal prudence to investors. It's also a way to avoid firing people for cause.

Part of the reason some companies will kind of couch it as a layoff is because there's a little bit more legal protection. If you fire somebody, it's easier for them to sue for you know, if they're part of a protected class, that sort of thing, if they feel like they've been discriminated against.

But Joe says that there is some evidence that the attitude towards letting go of workers for any reason is starting to shift for companies too.

There's research that says that companies that are quick to lay people off for financial reasons don't do as well as other companies that wait longer and do everything that they can to keep people because it's very expensive to replace people, especially folks who are trained, who are good at their jobs. So are layoffs bad for business Oftentimes yes? Oftentimes yes. I mean there are times, of course, when business executives have no choice. They truly don't for whatever reason,

And as for Sylvia, the former YouTube employee, she says she was lucky enough to get a good severance package, so she was able to take her time looking for new gigs, and as she was sending out applications, she kept making podcast episodes.

I can't believe this marks twenty conversations with incredible people in my life. Thank you to everyone who continues listening.

When an executive at Into It came across Sylvia's resume, he started listening.

And so he said that at first he listened to the first few to get to know me, but then he enjoyed them, and then they became part of his routine. I was concerned that it was going to be a red flag. It ended up being a grain flag.

Sylvia went in for an interview in this past January. She started in a new role at Into It, but she's returning to the workforce with a slightly different mindset. Did your layoff change the way you tie your identify to work at all?

First starters, my mom stopped calling me Mini Google felt they definitely have. I have, Sarah. I try to be very purposeful to say I have other identities outside of work. Obviously a mother, a daughter, a sister, a friend, and I also have a relationship with myself right and I now believe that by taking care of these other aspects of my life, I will be a better employee overall. So I have definitely.

This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. This episode was produced by Thomas lou and Jessica Beck. It was mixed by Blake Maples. It was fact checked by Adrian Atapia. It was edited by Stacy Vannicksmith and Raehan harmanci. Our senior producers are Kim Gittlson and Naomi Shaven. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso, Nicole Beemsterbor is our executive producer. Sat Bowman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. If you liked this episode, make sure to subscribe and review