Laid off, now what? A guide to thrive after a lay off
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In February 2026, Canada lost approximately 83,900 jobs and mine was one of them.
If you have been on Reddit in the past few months, you might have noticed an uptick of the same threads asking for advice following a layoff. They all focus at a very high level on what you should do after it happened.
I have been through this process multiple times and took the time to really understand what filters you out before anyone human even sees your resume and what makes you shine during interviews.
The hiring process in 2026 feels broken. Artificial Intelligence with Large Language Models are now being added into the mix. This guide is for everyone who doesn’t really know how to bounce back after a layoff and needs help to figure out next steps.
The signs
While it often comes off as a surprise, there are usually a lot of signs that show up months before layoffs happen.
If you are working at a small company, signs are usually easier to spot. If you have access to some financial data like project contracts you can see the amount of money coming in and estimate what’s coming out. It usually goes like this: only small projects (and not enough of them) are coming in, there’s a focus on retaining existing clients, the CEO or founder is spending all his time meeting with new clients trying to find work. Internal moonshot projects are being prioritized so team members have enough work to do during the day, the list goes on.
At medium and large sized companies, one of the first signs is usually a shift in how well “we’re doing”. Yesterday, we were doing great! Today, we need to refocus on our core mission, deliver more with less, adapt to market conditions, and make sure we’re ahead of the competition. Last quarter numbers weren’t good enough despite what the outsiders are saying. A hiring freeze is put in place. You can forget about the annual bonus. Part of the company will do a reorg, other departments will follow. Small targeted layoffs are happening, then bigger ones.
- Former HR here - subtle signs your company is preparing for layoffs
- For those recently laid off, what was the first sign your company was heading toward cuts? Trying to understand the early warning indicators
- Signs that a layoff is coming
It’s happening now
Then one day (usually a Thursday) you receive a 15-minute ‘Business update’ meeting invite that was sent the morning of from your N+2 or Head of. You can’t see who’s invited to the meeting, you can’t forward the invite either.
If you’ve been laid off before, the PTSD that has been slowly ramping up in the past couple of months is now at its highest. You know it doesn’t smell good but you never know. Some companies during COVID used to have two meetings at the same time. This time, however, there’s only one meeting, everyone is laid off.
If you are lucky enough, you’ll keep your access until Friday end of day (Thursday if they want you out quickly). If you work in big tech, it’s even more brutal: you don’t have access to your laptop anymore. That’s how you know, even if you’re not a developer with production access.
Despite the confusion, the shock, the incomprehension, now is the time to act. Here’s what I recommend you to do:
- Sync with your manager right after the layoff meeting. Ask them as many questions as you want but be prepared for them not having the answers
- Call your significant other and share the unfortunate news. You’ll need their support more than ever
- Spread the news, talk to everyone you’re working with in the company. If you work in a large company, chances are not everyone knows about it. Tell them that you’re being laid off, only have access to internal resources until a specified date and time, and that if they need anything they need to let you know
- Make a list of everything that’s in flight and hand it over to someone else. Give admin access to projects, Jira boards, Confluence space, etc. Share the latest and most up-to-date documents. By the end of the day, your team should be able to access everything without having to ask you or IT
- Save your personal documents, screenshot Workday information (pay, vacation tracker, etc)
- While you still have access to Slack or Teams, add everybody that you’ve interacted with on LinkedIn, even if they are not in the same department, city, or country as you are
- Schedule 1-1s with your closest colleagues and vent, talk about next steps, and offer help. They are going to have to deal with the additional work on their end
- If your teams have a daily meeting (like a daily stand-up) on Friday morning, join it! Say goodbye
The aftermath
If you’ve ever worked on change management, you might be already familiar with the Kübler-Ross model (five stages of grief). After a traumatic experience like a layoff, you will most likely go through some or all of these steps:
While the experience of losing a job is nowhere near like the loss of a close individual, it’s still a loss. You’re not only losing a stable income but you’re also losing a routine, seeing the same faces every day, a commute, stability, potential career advancements, work benefits. The more you tied your identity to your job, the harder it will be. Take the time you need to reflect on your career, what you accomplished so far, who you are at your core, and ask for help whenever you need it.
What you should do immediately after:
- Apply for Employment Insurance - it can take a month (in Canada) for them to process your case
- Contact an employment lawyer to get the best severance package possible
- Share the news on LinkedIn! You will be surprised at who reaches out to offer help
What you should do a couple of days after:
- Depending on your financial situation, sit down and update your budget. If you lived below your means and have a lot of money saved, that’s great! If you don’t, then the job search is going to be way more stressful than what it already is
- Take some time to process what just happened to you. Take a week off if you can. If you were already seeing a psychologist or a psychotherapist, continue seeing them. If you don’t, now might be a good time to contact one. You’ll most likely still have access to your work benefits for a certain period of time. Use them! Go to the dentist, get a new pair of glasses
- Talk to your friends, your family. Reach out to ex-colleagues that were also impacted. Be vulnerable and share with them how hard the entire process is, ask for their help if you need it
- Get out of the house. Go for walks, get a coffee or a tea at that new place around the corner
- Exercise! Even if it’s only 15 minutes a day. The more the better
The search begins
Looking for a job has changed a lot in the past few years. Depending on how much work you’ve already done in the past, you might have a lot of work in front of you.
While the ultimate goal is to get a new job and sign an offer, your main goal at first is to bypass the applicant tracking system (ATS) and the recruiter to get your resume in front of the hiring manager to dramatically up your chances.
If you don’t already know this, the only person who will truly look out for your career is you.
LinkedIn profile
Even before talking about your resume, let’s talk about LinkedIn. If you don’t already have a profile, create one. Add a professional profile picture, your past roles (you don’t have to add the details yet) and optimize it as much as you can. The most important thing is to make sure to add everyone you know (people you were at school with, worked with, interacted with, have been introduced to, family, friends, etc) in your network and to request recommendations to your closest ex-colleagues and managers.
If you already have a profile, send a connection request to everyone you know and update every sections (headline, summary, skills, and so on) with your next role in mind. Your network will be your greatest strength.
Spend some time in the settings too. Customize your profile URL, review all privacy settings and make sure you have a good understanding of how your profile is set up and what is publicly available outside of the platform.
ATS
Applicant tracking system (ATS) have also changed a lot since they were first introduced but even more so in the past few years. They now use artificial intelligence (AI) tools and natural language processing to make it “easier” for companies to find the right candidate for the current opening.
What this means is that no one will even look at your resume to check if you are a potential fit if you haven’t optimized your resume for ATS. You need a resume that’s 100% ATS compliant, have the right keywords and make sure they can parse the file format your resume is in to be able to have a good score and increase the chances to have someone to look at your resume.
On keywords, use the same one as the job description. If they mention AWS, you must have the acronym too, just having Amazon Web Services won’t be enough. The ATS also doesn’t understand synonyms like “developer” vs “engineer”. Use the same language as the role in your resume.
What I found worked best to make sure the ATS is correctly parsing your resume is to upload a .docx version made for the ATS and then changing it right before submitting to the polished PDF version.
Resume
You should have at least 3 resumes:
- One with everything that you’ve done in your professional career. It doesn’t matter if this file is 15 pages long. Write everything down, every bullet point counts. It doesn’t need to be pretty as this file is just for you but the bullet points need to be good enough to be used in a resume. Don’t write a novel
- One that is going to be a summarized/targeted version of your career for a specific role. You can have a generic/base version of it that you can update for each role. Get this version reviewed by as many people as possible. Simple layout, no columns
- One for the Applicant tracking system (ATS). The same as the one above but without any formatting. Plain text.
LinkedIn search
One aspect that few people are talking about in the job search is timing. You could have the best resume on earth, scoring a 100% match against the job description for the role of your dreams, if you apply a week after it was first posted on the job board, no one will look at it.
In May 2025, LinkedIn launched a new search experience with “AI” - Transforming Career Search Experience with AI - and they have since expanded it to more people in January 2026 (LinkedIn is expanding its AI-powered job search features). What the “AI” does is translating your natural language query in a job search using the filters they are now hiding from you. It’s not possible to filter by most recent and the result is that you’re seeing way more promoted roles that have been posted ages ago.
In short, it’s terrible and it’s actually working against you. Don’t use the AI search and filter on the most recent job roles.
Referrals
Referrals are more important than ever. In some companies, they WILL make you skip the line and will 100% get you a screening call. In others, they are useless. When I was working at Microsoft a couple of years ago, I was surprised to read a post on the internal Yammer where full-time employees complained that their referrals were going nowhere.
Why? Because referrals are not all the same:
- Cold
- The person you know (or don’t really know) enters your name and email address on the company ATS and that’s it. You receive an email to apply and you’re all set. This is still better than applying by yourself but it’s not way better. Why? Because people who could make a buck with hiring incentive programs would refer everyone and anyone. If you go on Blind and Glassdoor, a lot of people are asking for referrals and a lot of people are eager to help but recruiters are not completely out of touch. They can tell the employee doesn’t really know the person they referred and that those referrals are a weak signal of competence.
- Warm
- You know the person referring you, they might not be working in the same department as the hiring manager but that’s ok. Not only the person who’s referring does the above but they also reach out to the hiring manager to sell your profile and share your resume with them.
- Strong
- Not only you know the person referring you, you worked with them in the past. They work in the same department or even better in the same team. They know the hiring manager and will fight hard for you. This is the best kind of referral you can get.
If you’re networking on LinkedIn, doing introductions calls or “coffee chats” with people you don’t know, don’t ask for a referral. Some of them might offer it and in that case you can thank them and accept it but otherwise it’s not a good idea. If your contact is a friend or an ex-colleague, ask them if they can also ping the hiring manager or if they can share their name with you so you can do it yourself.
Finding the hiring manager
In some cases, it’s not only possible but easy to find the recruiter and/or the hiring manager for a specific role by searching directly on LinkedIn.
Search the “job title + hiring + name of the company”, filter on “Posts”, sort by most recent, and with some luck you’ll find someone talking about the role you just applied to.
Send them an InMail saying you just applied to the role with a short elevator pitch on why they should choose you, include your resume, and hope for the best. It doesn’t work every time but it’s significantly better than just applying on the company’s website.
Interview preparation
You applied, got a reply back and have an interview scheduled. It’s your time to shine.
The first interview is usually a screening call with the recruiter who’s not technical and doesn’t know much about the role or the team. What you need at this stage is a killer “intro” when they’ll ask “tell me more about you” and a confident answer when they’ll ask you about the salary.
The answer to “Please tell me more about you” is something you need to master. There are a ton of videos on YouTube you can watch to get tips and practice. Most of them will outline the Present-Past-Future framework:
- Present: Your current role and key responsibilities (15-20 seconds)
- Past: Relevant experience that led you here (20-30 seconds)
- Future: Why you’re excited about this opportunity (10-15 seconds)
The next interviews will be behavioral where they’ll try to measure your past behaviors as a predictor of future results. You need to prepare those in advance, have good stories to tell, and use the “STAR” method. Write down questions and potential stories you could use as answers and practice them. Work on the tone and delivery on the day of the interview, they shouldn’t sound like a memorized answer even when they are.
Rejection
Don’t take it personally.
You’ll get rejected dozens if not hundreds of times during the process and it’s actually good. Most companies won’t even bother to send you an automated rejection email. Why are they rejecting your application? You’ll never know. Remember your worth, your strengths, the things you need to work on, and carry on.
They are not rejecting you - only your application for a specific job at a specific moment in time.
Tracking
To make the entire process easier, you’ll need to track your job applications. I’d also recommend to save the job description of every job you applied to in case the listing goes down before your interviews.
What I’m tracking:
- Number of applications
- Role, Company
- Salary range / Salary entered in the ATS
- If I was referred or if I cold DMed someone about the job
- Dates of every step (application, confirmation email received, screening call, interviews, rejection email, etc)
I’m using Obsidian and .MD files but used Notion in the past. Use what makes sense for you and what’s easily available and maintainable for your own process.
Focus & disconnect
You might have heard “Looking for a job is a full-time job” and I think it’s a terrible piece of advice.
At first, you’ll need to spend a lot of time on all the steps I’ve highlighted above but once you have a good base you absolutely don’t need to spend 8 hours a day applying at jobs. You’ll burn out.
Job searching is already hard enough, you don’t want to add more stress. Have a solid base, create a schedule, focus on the job search, know yourself and when it’s the best time to apply and interview during the day.
And then, disconnect! Don’t look at LinkedIn, at your resume, at new jobs. Do you have a hobby? Focus on that! If you don’t have one, I’m sure there’s something you’ve always wanted to learn but never had time for. Focus on what brings you joy. Go for a walk, listen to music, go see your friends and family, workout at the gym or in front of a YouTube video in your living room.
You might have weeks with nothing, then suddenly multiple interviews daily. This is normal. Stay focused on what you can control: your applications, your network, your mental health. Keep refining your approach. The rest will follow.