In tech, you’re rarely warned about layoffs. Instead, you find one morning that you can’t log in to your laptop. But what if you’re one of the people left behind? That’s an awkward spot, and it gets more awkward the moment you start searching. If you tip off your boss that you’re looking for a new job, you’ll land on their radar for the next round.
Most layoff advice speaks to people who have already lost their job. This article is for those who are still employed, at least for now. I’ve coached tech professionals and executives through layoffs for nearly a decade, and over the past year, I’ve seen the possibility of getting laid off become the most common reason people reach out. When they see the writing on the wall, they want to find a new role before they lose their current one. Here’s how to look for a job during layoffs while protecting the one you still have.
How to Job Search During Tech Layoffs
- Spot early warning signs: Monitor earnings calls, missed fundraising rounds, executive turnover, mergers, or “AI-first” announcements.
- Define strict role criteria: Write down exact salary, location and workplace requirements before applying so you can evaluate offers quickly.
- Outreach beyond your network: Reach out directly to hiring managers and current employees on LinkedIn when your existing contacts are also out of work.
- Search discreetly: Automate job discovery using personal devices — never work electronics — and maintain daily performance to avoid tipping off management.
- Contextualize past cuts: Focus interviews on company fit rather than financial instability and list total affected headcounts on your resume to clarify the cuts weren’t performance-based.
- Time your exit strategically: Negotiate start dates around equity vesting milestones or ask your new employer for a sign-on bonus to offset unvested equity.
How to Spot Signs That You May Be Next
Your company won’t warn you that they’re going to lay you off, but you may be able to spot some signs. In tech, you can see them in the company’s public communications. They tend to show up in news about how the company is doing financially, long before anything changes for your team.
If you work at a publicly traded company, listen to the quarterly earnings call or read the transcript afterward. Consider a missed revenue target, a stock drop the following day or an executive promising “operational efficiency” a warning sign. These usually come months before HR invites you to a discussion about your future at the company.
If you work at a startup, keep an eye on fundraising. A round that was expected to close and didn’t means the company has less cash than it planned for, and payroll is almost always the largest expense.
Changes in the C-suite are often another sign that layoffs are coming. A new CFO, a departing CEO or turnover in the CRO or CMO seat usually means someone was finally held accountable for the numbers, and the incoming leader will want to show results quickly.
An acquisition works the same way, whether your company is doing the acquiring or being acquired. The two companies at issue will likely have overlapping roles across all levels, from individual contributors to the C-suite, and cuts tend to follow a merger within a few months, if not sooner.
The newest sign that there’s going to be a layoff is an AI announcement. When a company tells shareholders it’s becoming “AI-first” or that AI will handle work previously done by employees, reductions often follow. According to Challenger, Gray and Christmas, AI has been the most cited reason for U.S. job cuts for five consecutive months through July 2026. Whether or not AI is the real cause, an announcement like this is your cue to pay attention.
One of my clients, an engineering executive at a startup, noticed that the funding round his company had been counting on kept getting pushed back, then the executives stopped mentioning it at all. He read that silence as a sign that money was about to be tight and layoffs were coming, so he started searching while he still had a job. He landed a new role, a few months before his former company announced significant layoffs.
None of these signals mean you’ll definitely be cut, but they do tell you that it would be smart to follow the steps below.
How to Decide What You Want From a Job
The first offer you get after a layoff is hard to turn down because you’re traumatized and scared you’ll never be hired again. Take a deep breath. I find that clients who haven’t decided what they need in their next position tend to latch onto that offer like a life preserver. Then they email me a few months or even weeks later, regretting their hasty decision.
Before you click apply for any opportunity, write down what you require in your next role and what you won’t accept. Be specific enough that you could say yes or no to a job description within seconds of reading it. For some clients, this looks like a maximum commute of 30 minutes to an hour, three to four days per week in the office and a company whose values they can name without looking them up. For others, it’s a salary floor, a team size or a specific product area.
Vague preferences don’t help here. One of my clients wanted hybrid work, which describes most of the tech job market these days. I assigned him homework that asked him to name the exact number of days he wanted to be in the office, and he landed on two to three. From there, he stopped applying to fully in-person roles since he knew he’d be unhappy if he accepted one, and he stopped interviewing with companies that were never going to give him what he wanted.
How to Network When Everyone Is Out of Work
The standard advice tells you to ask your network for referrals, but that advice assumes your network still has jobs.
A client of mine was at a large tech company when it cut thousands of roles last fall. Almost every Slack community member, friend at work and colleague he’d normally turn to for an introduction were laid off within days of each other. That meant everyone in his network was looking for a job at the same time, and they were all reaching out to a dwindling pool of survivors for referrals.
Since his network couldn’t help, we pointed his outreach at people he didn’t know. He reached out on LinkedIn to employees at companies with openings, and he applied directly to those roles. To his surprise, those employees responded, including hiring managers. Within a few weeks, he had interviews scheduled that his old network could never have produced. As of this writing, he’s in final-round interviews with multiple companies.
Reach out to people you don’t know, even if it feels intimidating. When your network is also out of work, that outreach is often the difference between securing an interview and hearing crickets on your applications.
How to Search Without Your Coworkers Noticing
In tech, it’s incredibly common to end up competing with a colleague or your manager for the same new role at another company. Your manager may become your peer, or your peer may become your manager somewhere else. Companies hire from similar companies, and the way you talk about your employer in Slack or in LinkedIn comments during layoffs can follow you to your next gig.
The bigger giveaway that you’re looking is a drop in your performance, so be careful not to overextend yourself. The idea that you should be job searching full-time is a myth. If it’s taking you that much time, you’re doing it wrong, and your coworkers or your manager will notice.
Try to automate as much of the job search process as you can. Many of my clients set up AI agents to handle the repetitive work. One built an agent that scanned for open roles that matched his parameters, including location, hybrid or remote, salary requirements and target companies. That way, he wasn’t spending his workday scrolling through job boards, not getting his actual work done. Focus on what you can’t automate, which are the conversations. You can usually slot those into a workday.
I recognize this might seem obvious to a tech audience, but you should also assume that your employer is monitoring all your work-provided electronics. Employee monitoring tools have expanded quickly with AI, so you should always search for a job using your personal device.
How to Explain a Layoff on Your Resume
In tech, there are two types of layoffs. Either you were cut because you weren’t performing, or you were cut because your name landed on a list. One of my clients at Amazon told me that managers there are required to place roughly 8 percent of their team on performance improvement plans at all times. Netflix has its keeper test, where managers are asked whether they’d fight to keep each employee. Hiring managers know this, so when they hear “layoffs,” they don’t know which kind you mean. Your job is to make it clear, quickly, that your experience was the second kind, i.e., not your fault.
In an interview, don’t lead with the issue of layoffs. If you frame your search as being necessary because of your company’s financial uncertainty, a recruiter or interviewer may wonder whether you’ll leave them the moment they hit a rough quarter. Instead, focus on why you want to work at this company and the unique value you’ll bring. Keep the answer to the layoff question to a sentence if the issue comes up directly.
If you’ve already been cut, be sure to add some context to your resume so no one has to guess why, such as, “One of roughly 14,000 employees affected by a reduction in force.” Providing a percentage or headcount makes it clear that the cut wasn’t about you. In tech, layoffs are understood as part of the industry.
Should You Take a Lily Pad Role?
With fewer openings out there than there were a few years ago, companies can wait for the purple squirrel, meaning the candidate who checks every box. So, holding out for the perfect role while your company cuts staff is a bigger bet than it used to be.
A lily pad or stepping-stone role gets you to solid ground, even if it’s not where you’ll stay. One of my clients wanted to move from banking into tech, so instead of going straight to a fintech startup, he took a role at a payment processing company first, then moved to the fintech company he’d wanted to work at from the start, less than two years later.
Your circumstances will determine whether you take a lily pad role or hold out for the job you truly want. A lily pad makes sense if your company’s financials or funding are visibly deteriorating and you’d receive little or no severance, if you’re running low on liquid cash, or if you’re in a niche function where openings are rare.
If you’re enjoying your current role, have a vest date within reach or a savings cushion and feel relatively safe, you may decide to hold out.
When clients are torn, I encourage them to ask themselves whether they’ll kick themselves down the line for not taking the offer.
How to Time Your Exit for Vesting and Severance
Generic layoff advice often skips the money conversation. This is generally more nuanced in tech, where a large share of compensation is equity that vests on a schedule, often with a one-year cliff, then quarterly or annually after that. The company usually only pays severance if you’ve been laid off, not if you quit.
This is why clients who are close to a vesting date or whose company is approaching an IPO often keep searching but push their start date past the deadline. If you’re two months from a vest worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, it often makes sense to interview now and negotiate a later start.
If you do leave with unvested equity, you can ask the new company to cover what you’re giving up. One of my clients brought up the equity she’d be forfeiting during the offer stage. The new company asked for documentation before agreeing, and she had to provide an official letter from her current employer confirming the unvested amount, but the new company then paid her what she was sacrificing as a sign-on bonus.
Job Searching During Layoffs
If you’re still inside a company during layoffs, you have something the people who have already been cut don’t: time to job search while still earning a paycheck. Spot the signs early, decide what you want before an offer arrives, search in a way your coworkers won’t notice and know exactly what you’d be walking away from before you resign.
