Laid Off — What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do

Practical tips for anyone looking for work

Walking into the sunrise on Carrol Creek, — Frederick, Maryland by Joshua McDonald

Seventeen years and three months ago I found myself reading an email from my employer giving me a couple of weeks to clear out my office and turn in my things, including my permission to work and live in Germany. I had been laid off, and it was devastating! Right now in the midst of a pandemic over 20 million Americans are going through the very same thing. That number includes many that I know personally. I wanted to share some things I picked up during my recent job search, which ended in an opportunity that I never in a million years had pictured for myself. You will get there as well. I know it because you are some of the most talented people I have worked with!

It was never about you

First, you need to realize this was never about you — don’t dwell on what you could have done or should have done, as most of these decisions are carried out because of some unforeseeable circumstance. Sometimes, these are those one in a million events like 9/11, or fall of the Berlin Wall, or Covid. More often than not, however, they indicate that the company wanted to go in a new direction, or was forced to by the market. Other times, the company recently went through an acquisition and that thing about cutting costs, well, that fell on your department. There’s a myriad of reasons but — see what I did? Not once do you play a part in any of this, so if you are blaming yourself or wasting even a second armchair quarterbacking what you could have done differently — stop!

Time is never on your side

No matter what the Rolling Stones say, time is not on your side, no it isn’t. This is twice as true if your visa is tied to your work, which is what happened to me. You will need to make decisions quickly and stick to them. In our case, we decided within a week to move back to the United States and within 60 days, with the help of so many, we were able to land on our feet in Maryland. But make no mistake, it would take years until we were back to the same way of life that we had before having our world turned upside down. This won’t be easy, but at a minimum you will need to have the answers to the following questions thought out before you start your job search. I recommend you write them down and refer to them often:

• How long can your search last? It’s important to understand the parameters that you are working with — you will want to estimate conservatively, so if you feel like you have two months then shoot for 1 to 1.5 months. You spent eight hours a day (at least) working at your old job. Your new job is, well, looking for your new job — put in the time!
• What do you need to make to get by?
• What are you morally opposed to doing? This is important; don’t compromise your beliefs for a paycheck lest you find yourself in the same spot again.
• Should you stay or should you go? Can you relocate? How far are you willing to drive?

Practical tips for anyone looking for work

You are going to be in saving mode, but you will need to spend the extra money for LinkedIn Premium until you find work. Premium will give you access to connect to a limited number of people outside of your network each month and allow you to message and find people that are not in your network. Plus as a bonus it will give you the number of candidates that applied for the position and an assessment of how well your skills stack up against the competition.

Here’s how you will use these features.

I’m assuming you got off the phone with human resources and started updating your resume and LinkedIn profile immediately — if that’s not the case you will want to do that. There are some good posts on resume writing and I encourage you to dig in more there, however, for the sake of moving on make sure that you at least:

• Use numeric values and equate your successes to either time saved, money saved or a combination of both — be quantitative!
• Check out your skills list — make sure it’s current and note where it gets cut off below the fold.
• Be yourself! Don’t use words or try to be someone you are not because the goal is to get in front of someone and discuss the qualifications and how they will help your new employer’s business — if you have conducted interviews you know the worst thing is when someone can’t explain entries on their resume. Details matter! We’re going to touch on this more below in the Interview section.
• Think about your personal philosophy — if you are an engineer what sums up your beliefs — leadership or teaching philosophy — think deeply about why you are doing what you are doing and let your passion shine.

Ok, fast forward! After you find and apply to a position that checks all the boxes on your list above, go to LinkedIn. Find the human resources, chief people officer, or in-house recruiter of the company you applied to and send them a message letting them know that you have applied to the position and that you are interested in working for them. This will often lead to a conversation. Remember to ask when they will be available for a phone call. That’s right, you want to make the first move here. As your search lengthens you will widen your network and you will start to see the recommended jobs narrow to more of a fit.

Finally, now that you have access to a wider set of people, use this to look up the in-house recruiters for companies that you really want to work for and reach out with a sincere message that demonstrates why you would love to work for them. Yes, I know — there wasn’t a position posted. But that doesn’t matter. If you are passionate and can make your case, the person on the other end may help you. Remember, they have a list of positions that you may not see in front of them.

Recruiters

Ok, so you’ve updated your profile, started applying for positions, and are making cold calls to the in-house recruiters at companies that you would love to work for. What about those recruiters that don’t work for the company? I can only give you my first-hand experience as someone who has both relied on recruiters to find people for hard-to-fill, niche positions, and as someone who has worked through a recruiter to land a position.

I’ve found that the positions that I needed recruiters for were, well, like I said above, niche, so if you have a certain skillset you will certainly do well going through a recruiter.

The interview

I’ve found that the Situation, Action, Result method works best to frame the answers to interviewers’ questions best. The method can be broken down to the following:

• Situation — Outline the situation (but please do it briefly).
• Action — Explain the actions that you took. This is the most important part of your answer; don’t dwell on the situation. When all this is said and done and someone asks you, “Tell me about a challenging time when work took an unexpected turn,” the interviewer is really more interested in what you did and the result. The situation — like I said before, that’s not on you. It’s all in how you react.
• Result — Describe the result. Again, don’t be longwinded. Most results speak for themselves.

Something extra for engineers looking for work

• Coding challenges — If you haven’t been doing coding challenges at least weekly, I really recommend leetcode. It has a good set of questions that the FAANG companies use; plus, if you pay the monthly fee you can scour the discussion board for insight into what companies have been asking recently and prepare accordingly.
• Whiteboarding — When doing a whiteboard session, talk out loud about what you are doing. Practice makes perfect, and just like you would not show up to give a speech without practicing, you also don’t want to wing the whiteboard session. Grab a dry erase marker and a window then try to go through some of the coding challenges above. Explain them to your cat if you have to. One more thing: you usually can pick any language for these exercises. Say what you will, but Python is an excellent choice for writing code with a sharpie.
• Please purchase and read Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell. You are now trying to compress a year’s worth of preparation into a fraction of the timeframe that you outlined above in your written list.
• Practice system design questions. See bullet point one!

This is only scratching the surface. I feel for all of you and wish I could do more. I know it won’t be easy, but remember it’s not your fault. Don’t dwell, put in the work, focus 100% on your next step, and as hard as this is, it will pass.