When Did Getting Laid Off Become a Full-Time Job?

The second time designer and illustrator Courtney Myers got laid off looked a lot like the first. Again she received a mysterious Google Meet invite over Slack. Again she was told she was let go immediately upon joining the call. And again she wasn't given a reason. But unlike the first layoff, more than six months passed between jobs. Then another six months. Finally, this past December, she bagged a new full-time gig at an events agency start-up — only after a design of hers, advertising that she was "desperate for work," went viral.

"I really thought I would find something straight away because I had all this experience, but the months dragged on," Myers, who is based in the UK, tells PS. There were periods when she estimates she was submitting an average of 30 applications a day, often fielding interviews with companies that required her to do unpaid tasks before ultimately hiring other candidates. "They would be really long, drawn-out processes that involved a lot of work, but you either got ghosted or they gave you no feedback and just said no thanks. I didn't know what else I could be doing."

Even though the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 7.8 million job losses across industries in the second quarter of 2024 alone, the experience of being laid off is often still isolating. People feel "shame" and "guilt" when they're axed, regardless of how many posts they see from peers detailing the sometimes gruesome and unceremonious ways they've also been let go. To cope, job-seekers like Myers are mining their professional skills to create solidarity.

Chanelle Howell is a reverse recruiter, employment interview coach, and career consultant.

Knee-deep in cover letters and cold emails, Myers recently stumbled upon some comments from recruiters and hiring managers saying they were turned off by LinkedIn's built-in "#OpenToWork" banner (the graphic that employment-hopefuls can add to the bottom of a profile picture to indicate their status). This pushed Myers over the edge. She wanted to clap back, so she designed a similar banner that instead reads "#Desperate." The post, which racked up over 400,000 likes and generated nearly 10,000 comments, clearly resonated.

"Frankly, as a victim of redundancy, I am desperate, and I don't think that's anything to be ashamed of," Myers wrote. "Being laid off doesn't reflect a lack of skills, talent or work ethic — it's just bad luck. No one should be embarrassed that they need to pay their rent and bills, support their family, or feed themselves."

Other creators have gone a step further, building entirely new outlets for the growing community of people who have been laid off. There's the upcoming literary anthology about the search for work from Rachel Meade Smith, the founder of popular job openings newsletter Words of Mouth. And there's a new digital platform featuring in-depth interviews with people who have been affected by layoffs, from California-based labor reporter Melanie Ehrenkranz.

After she was let go from a newsletter editor job in July 2023, Ehrenkranz needed a space that would not only allow her to continue reporting on her beat but also dampen the sting of the layoff. Instead of waiting around for a job offer in a volatile market — Chicago-based outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. reported in August 2024 that layoffs in the media industry were up 31 percent from the previous year — she created her own Substack site called Laid Off, which also now has a companion Discord with over 700 members.

"Laid Off has been an idea brewing in my brain for years after many a late night drinking cheap beers in dark bars with writer friends who were laid off and feeling like shit," Ehrenkranz tells PS. "It was something I wish I had post-layoff, so I figured, why not build it myself. And not just a newsletter, but a community."

Ehrenkranz, who is now also the head of content and community at Sophia Amoruso's entrepreneurship training program Business Class, asks her Laid Off interviewees the questions that don't always make it into the LinkedIn posts and professional announcements. She wants to know: What was the first thing you did when you found out? Who did you tell? If you had a group chat with former coworkers, what was it called? What resources have been helpful since?

"Layoffs are happening all around us," she says. "Let's come together and shoot the shit about it, make it feel less isolating. Maybe even kind of fun. And let's help each other out."

Indie platforms like Laid Off offer an antidote to the anxiety created by social media sites like LinkedIn, where 1 billion people currently share their career updates and search for new jobs. Career coach Chanelle Howell tells PS that LinkedIn has become a space where it's easy to feel terrible when something goes wrong — and sometimes even when something goes right.

"LinkedIn feels like it's just showing two ends of a spectrum, either the 'I got laid off' or the 'happy to announce I've been promoted or I'm starting a new job,'" she says. "You're either there when you're really happy and it feels cruel, or you're there when you're down bad. The vast majority of people on LinkedIn are existing in between, but there's no status to that."

While other platforms encourage a more linear view, Ehrenkranz wants Laid Off to be a home for nuance. One subject her subscribers are especially curious about is health insurance post-layoff. In what she describes as "the most radicalizing interview series so far," she talked to folks who had to forgo their medication because they could no longer afford it, went into debt to pay for urgent procedures, or just lived without health insurance altogether.

Interviewees for that series included cancer survivors, pregnant people, new parents, and people with chronic illnesses. "For many, it was deciding between rent or health insurance," she says.

When Myers was laid off for the second time, she had no choice but to give up her just-rented flat in London and move back in with her parents in Southampton, over an hour away. Suddenly, she no longer qualified for London-based jobs she might have wanted that were newly requiring employees to return to the office.

Howell points out that the job application process is "fatiguing to all parties," including recruiters, who are having to sift through more and more applications, many of which were thrown together as quickly as possible to try to beat the masses. "The entire process is set up to be pretty demoralizing," Howell says.

That may help to explain why it feels like job-seekers today have to go to extraordinary lengths — for Myers, it was going viral — to not only get hired, but get just the bare minimum, like an email response.

"Why can't it be as simple as applying for maybe 10 jobs, and you hear back from all of them? I don't know why it's become the fucking Hunger Games," Myers says. "It just feels like you have to do something to stand out, you have to know someone at the company, or do a crazy marketing campaign. There's no right way to do it anymore, and that's really confusing for a lot of people."

"It's never been so much work to find a job," Howell concurs.

But if that part isn't getting easier any time soon, at least there are more people trying to make the experience of being unemployed that much more tolerable. "People are bonding over how deflating and frustrating it is to job hunt right now," Ehrenkranz says. "There's still a lot of stigma around being laid off, though I think that's starting to change."

Emma Glassman-Hughes (she/her) is the associate editor at PS Balance. In her seven years as a reporter, her beats have spanned the lifestyle spectrum; she's covered arts and culture for The Boston Globe, sex and relationships for Cosmopolitan, and food, climate, and farming for Ambrook Research.