Recruitment

On layoff lists, recruiters find top talent

How recruiters feast off other companies’ famine.
article cover

Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images

· 5 min read

Since the beginning of the year, over 330 tech startups have laid off over 50,000  employees—that’s according to Layoffs.fyi, a website dedicated to tracking startup layoffs since the pandemic. In recent weeks, the pain has seeped into other industries, with real estate and crypto each reducing headcounts, and Wall Street predicted to follow suit.

To help impacted workers land on their feet, HR professionals and recruiters have begun circulating “layoff lists” across social media sites like LinkedIn and Twitter. The lists contain the names and titles of impacted employees to help connect talent with ready-to-hire recruiters.

On the list. Layoff lists have been floating around for a few years (for example, in 2019, a former Uber employee spearheaded an over-400-person one), but took off in earnest during the 2020 Covid-19 layoffs. Roger Lee started Layoffs.fyi in May 2020. The tool tallies the number of layoffs by company and across startups; where applicable, Lee links publicly posted, crowdsourced Google sheets and direct submissions to Layoffs.fyi with affected employees’ names, roles, and contact information.

During a call with HR Brew, Abhinav Agrawal, CEO and co-founder of tech-based recruiting agency Rocket, recalled that his team huddled in the spring of 2020 to discuss how they could help.

They settled on creating the Parachute list: a free-to-use tool where HR leaders or individual employees submit affected employees’ names, titles, and contact information for recruiters’ use. Recruiters can toggle through the more than 14,000 names by title and company to find matches of interest.

While Parachute isn’t the first of such lists, it has some privacy safeguards built in that makes it stand out. To use Parachute, Agrawal said, recruiters have to verify their business emails. One reason for this is to prevent predatory uses of the list, such as sending laid-off employees targeted marketing for services rolling over credit card debt, said Agrawal. Affected employees can also remove themselves from the list by emailing the Rocket team.

Recruiter relief. Agrawal argued there’s a misconception that layoff lists are “leftover lists,” i.e., talent nobody wants. He said that layoffs are generally the result of market factors and do not reflect an individual employees’ work ethics or abilities. He believes these kinds of lists can be a “phenomenal” resource for finding “very high quality talent,” in part because recruiters can be confident they’re reaching out to people who actually want jobs.

Ilana Pinsky, a technical sourcing recruiter at Amazon, is one such recruiter who says she uses layoff lists “a ton” to find top talent, particularly in engineering and tech.

Quick-to-read HR news & insights

From recruiting and retention to company culture and the latest in HR tech, HR Brew delivers up-to-date industry news and tips to help HR pros stay nimble in today’s fast-changing business environment.

Pinsky told HR Brew that typically her workflow consists of a lot of cold messaging on LinkedIn, known as “passive hiring.” She will reach out to potential candidates who have chosen the “Open to Work” setting on the platform.

Usually, Pinsky hears crickets.

“They may not necessarily realize that it’s still up there,” Pinsky explained, noting that the setting wasn’t a particularly useful indicator for recruiters. “It happens all the time. People just don’t even reply to us at all.”

When Pinsky reaches out to names on a layoff list, she said she’s much more likely to get a response.

“You know these people are looking for work, and so therefore, they’re probably going to be more inclined to respond to your message, because they’re very much open for work,” Pinsky said.

Other recruiters have picked up on Pinsky’s “creative sourcing strategy.” According to Agrawal, recruiters from startups all the way up to tech giants including Facebook, Amazon Web Services, Apple, Twitter, and Coinbase have made profiles on Parachute List.

Lee told Axios that recruiters are so grateful for the candidate data he provides that they’re sending thank-you notes and asking to directly sync their recruiting software with his dashboards.

Hot, tight American summer. Though layoffs rose this spring, it’s still a tight labor market for employers, with 11 million open jobs as of June, and Pinksy said that recruiters are sometimes under pressure to hit hiring metrics.

Targeting vulnerable employees in an effort to meet quotas could be labeled, as it was on LinkedIn by Joshua Goldstein, co-founder of tech job site Underdog.io, “ambulance-chasey.” Goldstein prefers to publish lists of companies that are still hiring, telling HR Brew that layoff lists felt “kind of sad and negative.”

Pinksy acknowledged that reaching out to affected employees could be “jumping on people who are in a vulnerable position,” but said that it was a “crappy” recruiting market.

“We also have headcounts to fill in. Sometimes recruiters can get a lot of heat if they don’t make their hires or hit their metrics on time. And it can put a lot of pressure on us as well,” Pinksy said. “But we are genuinely trying to help people get back on their feet…it is rewarding when we can find somebody a new job again.”—SV

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @SusannaVogel1 on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Susanna for her number on Signal.

Quick-to-read HR news & insights

From recruiting and retention to company culture and the latest in HR tech, HR Brew delivers up-to-date industry news and tips to help HR pros stay nimble in today’s fast-changing business environment.