Inside the whisper networks where laid-off coworkers job hunt and commiserate

Business Insider

3 days ago

After getting let go from Meta in February, Shayna Moon accepted an invitation to a private LinkedIn chat where she recognized the names of its roughly 40 members. All were former colleagues who'd also been dismissed from the tech giant.
Moon, who'd been laid off earlier in her career from Microsoft, said she shared tips with the group on how to apply for health and unemployment benefits, as well as advice she'd received from an employment lawyer.
"There's all this administrative stuff you have to do when you're laid off from a job," said the 34-year-old technical producer who lives in California. "It is nice to have a group of people to talk to who are all going through the same bullshit as you are."
Getting laid off used to mean having to hastily say goodbye to colleagues and start a job search alone. Not anymore.
Many workers who've been let go as part of mass restructurings are staying in touch by joining private online chat groups to vent, grieve, and help each other move on.
Unlike more generic alternatives open to anyone hit with a pink slip, these invite-only groups are strictly for individuals booted from the same organization, as they share many of the same frustrations and challenges.
A communication lifeline
Sara Russell, whose more than 25-year-career as a federal worker came to an abrupt end in February, said a group she joined helped her cope with the pain — and in ways friends and family couldn't.
"Everybody's in shock and you need to support each other," she told Business Insider. "As a group, we understood what was going on. We didn't have to explain it all."
Russell, 58, said one of her former colleagues set up the chat on the encrypted mobile app Signal a few weeks before they were axed. They sensed that layoffs were coming, she said, because the Trump administration had pledged to trim the federal workforce, and they chose Signal out of concern that their work computers were being monitored.
The club, which they named "Survivors," initially served as a way of exchanging information about their predicament, explained Russell, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. It later morphed into a communication lifeline once they officially got the boot and lost access to their work email.
"We were just cut off," she said. "There was no closure. I worked with 70,000 employees and I just disappeared off the map."
Surging worker resistance
In the wake of the pandemic, workers have been gravitating toward private online groups to contest the incursion of the workplace into their personal lives, according to Brooke Erin Duffy, an associate professor of communication at Cornell University who studies social-media culture.
"We have seen a surge in worker resistance," she said, citing the emergence of movements in recent years such as " quiet quitting," " bare minimum Monday," and " lazy girl jobs."
Though it's unclear just how many private worker groups exist, lately they've become increasingly important hubs for discussing topics such as layoffs, workplace surveillance, and the impact of generative AI on job security, added Duffy.
Between January and June, US-based employers slashed nearly 750,000 jobs, the most for the first half of any year since 2020, according to Challenger, Gray and Christmas. Excluding 2020, that number is the highest midyear total since 2009, the career-transition firm said.
"Against this backdrop, it makes sense that workers are turning to whisper networks," Duffy said.
Such groups tend to provide more than just emotional solace for layoff victims. They're typically also safe places to gripe about a former employer and ask sensitive questions, such as whether anyone in the group got a severance check yet, said Alison Fragale, an organizational psychologist in Chicago.
By contrast, taking complaints or sensitive questions to social media instead isn't likely to be as satisfying and could turn off prospective employers. "We've seen a lot of people do those things to their peril," she said.
The power of connections
Another benefit of private layoff clubs is that members are often willing to critique each other's résumés, engage in mock interviews and share job leads since everyone is in the same boat and already knows each other.
An exception, though, can occur if the group is small and comprises mostly people who previously had the same job function and are looking for work in the same industry and region, warned New York career coach Roy Cohen. In such cases, members might clam up since now "they are competing for the same opportunities," he said.
"Game Industry Job Hunt," a private Slack group for laid-off videogame-industry workers and volunteer helpers, is divided into 12 channels, each representing a game company that has been hit with heavy job cuts in recent years. Members are vetted before getting access only to the channel where they belong, though they can all go into a separate one called "Can You Refer Me," which works just like the name sounds.
The group's creator, Cristina Amaya, a producer of game-industry events in Los Angeles, said she chose Slack over other messaging apps since it's a common workplace tool and she thinks many people miss using it after losing their jobs. While she is currently employed and had a job when she formed "Game Industry Job Hunt" in late 2023, she said she's been laid off three times and set up the group because she likes helping people.
A big believer in the power of networking for finding jobs, Amaya recently introduced a member who was let go earlier this month from a job at "Assassin's Creed" developer Ubisoft Entertainment to a volunteer. The volunteer works at a game studio that the laid-off woman aspires to join.
"Your connections make everything for you," Amaya said. "They can be the people who get you in the door."
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