Why employees are boldly declaring their layoffs on Twitter & LinkedIn

After the heady days of multiple simultaneous job offers and 100 per cent joining hikes in 2021, Big Tech and start-up companies such as Twitter, Meta, Amazon, Salesforce, Cisco, BYJU’S, Zomato, Ola and Meesho have laid off 142,942 employees between January 1 and December 2, 2022, globally and in India, per tech-layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi. The reason: cooling tech demand amid global uncertainties. 

In a span of a little over a year, the situation has swung from ‘Great Resignation’ to ‘Great Uncertainty’ for employees. As layoffs become more common, hiring slows, and the power shifts back to the employers, less-appealing aspects of corporate culture are coming to the fore. Prabir Jha, a seasoned HR professional and Founder & CEO of Prabir Jha People Advisory, says Indian firms adopting an overly calculative approach towards layoffs is leading to impulsive decisions and insensitive execution, especially when social security is scarce and labour laws are not very favourable to white-collar employees. 

Business Today tried reaching out to more than 30 recently laid-off employees. Most of them were understandably tight-lipped because of severance contracts they may have signed. The handful who did agree to talk on the condition of anonymity said the style of layoffs was shocking, despite the good experiences they had while working for the company. 

One Twitter India employee says, “It came as a shock and it’s not a good feeling at all. A lot of people needed a stable paycheque. Especially in the midst of a recession, it becomes all the more difficult to find an alternative job which pays this well.” The 25-year-old is on a non-working notice period till January 5, 2023, after which he’ll get one month of severance pay. 

Shocked, for sure, but that’s not keeping employees from boldly announcing their layoffs on Twitter and LinkedIn. Perhaps the best example is of Twitter India public policy associate Yash Agarwal’s viral tweet which has 54.4k likes and more than 4,500 retweets: “Just got laid off. Bird App, it was an absolute honour, the greatest privilege ever to be a part of this team, this culture #LoveWhereYouWorked #LoveTwitter.” 

Their approach is also paying off in finding leads for their next opportunities. Gaming start-up Dream11’s CEO Harsh Jain tweeting to offer jobs to those laid off in the US with leadership experience in design, product, and tech was just one example of firms actively responding to the layoff posts on social media. The Twitter India employee who spoke to BT anonymously, claims he has multiple offers already for jobs in Singapore, Dubai, and India because of a tweet he put out. 

Professional networking platform LinkedIn, which has 875 million users globally, is filled with profile pictures with green rings around them signalling that they are #OpenToWork. One such profile is of a 29-year-old Salesforce developer in India. “Having to say you’re without a job feels shameful for some time. But, it doesn’t hamper job prospects because recruiters also understand that this is a global problem now.” The contract worker who was impacted as part of Salesforce’s global layoffs says he has had three interviews in a week since being let go. The firm did not respond to email queries from BT. 

In fact, LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky was quoted as saying that “compared to the rest of the world, members in India are over-indexing on networking, on messaging, on job seeking, on learning, which is unique”. A former employee of a Chennai-based start-up also posted about it on LinkedIn a day after getting laid off. “Of course, I didn’t post anything derogatory because the stint was a good learning experience. A few recruiters reached out as well.” She attended four interviews in the first week after getting the pink slip, with some help from her former employer as well. 

There’s no shame in talking publicly about getting fired, but the context of it not being performance-related makes all the difference, exiting employees say. “It needs the courage to be vulnerable on social media,” says Jha. Future employers could choose to read it according to their convenience. If you desperately need a skill, you overlook just about everything, he adds.