~by Haley Lynn Gray~
Most people will face job loss at some point in their career.
It used to carry a stigma — people wondered what you’d done wrong. That’s largely gone now, because layoffs, restructuring and reorganisation have become so commonplace that nobody reads them as a verdict on the person.
Which doesn’t make it feel any better when it happens to you. People who lose their jobs still experience a great deal — shock, anger, anxiety, a period of feeling quite low. I know, because I’ve been one of them.
Twice, in two years
I was first laid off from IBM in 2005, in a large round that took 1,200 of us. I found a job quickly, and spent close to sixty hours a week updating my resume, networking, applying and generally job-seeking.
In 2006, pregnant with my fourth child, I was laid off again. That time the entire branch office closed.
I had some genuinely hard decisions to make, including whether I wanted to go back to work at all with a fourth baby arriving and life already full.
What nobody prepares you for
Losing a job is partly losing a piece of your identity. A surprising amount of how you understand yourself turns out to be attached to what you do and where you do it, and you only discover how much when it’s removed.
There’s a social element too, and it’s worth naming because people find it bewildering. You worry you’ll lose friends. To some extent that does happen — not because anyone has judged you, but because people don’t know what to say, so they say nothing at all. Silence reads as distance when you’re already feeling exposed.
It’s fine to cry and mope and give yourself time. Grief, shock, anger and the rest are a normal part of it, and ignoring them makes the whole thing harder rather than shorter.
What to actually do
- Acknowledge it, and put a limit on it. A few days to a week of feeling terrible is reasonable and probably necessary. Setting an end date stops it becoming the default.
- Treat the search as the job. All the activities of finding work — the applications, the calls, the coffees — are now your occupation. Give them working hours and structure, because the days otherwise dissolve.
- Customise everything. One resume sent to forty places performs worse than ten tailored ones. This is tedious and it is the difference.
- Tell people. Friends, family, former colleagues, your entire network. A great many positions come through someone who knows someone, and nobody can help you if they don’t know you’re looking. This is the step people skip out of embarrassment, and it’s the one that works.
One thing worth adding: if the low period isn’t lifting after a few weeks, or you find yourself unable to do the ordinary things, that’s worth talking to someone about. Job loss is a genuine life stressor and treating it as one isn’t weakness.
The view from the other side of the desk
Something I understand now that I didn’t in 2006: I’ve since been the person making the decision.
Having been on both ends, a few things look different.
It genuinely usually isn’t about the person. I know that sounds like what you say. But the decisions I’ve been part of were about roles, funding, and what the business could carry — and the hardest ones involved people who were good at their jobs. That’s not a consolation exactly. It is accurate.
The silence afterwards is largely cowardice. Former colleagues go quiet because they’re uncomfortable, and possibly because they feel guilty about still being employed. If you’re the one still there, the useful thing is to make contact anyway, awkwardly, rather than waiting until you have something helpful to say. You won’t.
And how a company handles a layoff is remembered for years — by the people who left, and considerably more consequentially by the people who stayed. Everyone remaining is watching to learn what happens to people here when things get difficult.
It does pass
You will come out the other side, and you’ll be changed by it. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
For me it produced clarity about what I actually wanted to do and where I wanted to go — clarity I don’t think I’d have arrived at while comfortable. A great deal of what came afterwards started in that period.
That’s not a reason to be glad it happened. It’s a reason not to assume it’s only a loss.
What about you? Have you been through a job loss? How did you handle it?
About the author
Haley Lynn Gray is the founder of Leadership Girl, of In2itive Biz Solutions, and of the Women’s Entrepreneur Network — a community of more than 77,000 women in business.
She writes here about what happens when running a business starts demanding that you lead one. More about Haley →
