I’m going to have to look for another job in a few months and am particularly concerned about landing a job in a company that ends up doing a lay-off a few months to a year later. (This has happened to me in the past).
In this economy (America), seems like a very real threat.
Is there something investigative I can do to find out the possibility of a hiring company doing this?
One can check for news in the media, but that’s usually only helpful for bigger companies and can sometimes give info in a round-about way.
One can ask questions during a job interview but, of course, the answers are not entirely honest.
Why not look at it from the opposite angle? Assume you are going to be laid off. So you treat the job as a short-term contract. Replenish your financial reserves then start looking for a better job.
Many companies don’t even tell their managers about planned layoffs until right before it happens, so I’m not sure there’s much you can find. If they’re a publicly traded corporation (there are 10,000+ in the US and not all are huge) then you can look up their annual and quarterly reports to see what the trends are, but that won’t give you a sure-fire answer. Some companies hang onto employees even if things are down for a while, and some lay off employees even when they’re profitable.
My advice would be much like Quartz’s. Keep up on the rules in your state for unemployment and save as much of your wages as you can.
If your employer is a publically traded company, keep your eyes on the financial pages for a merger. Mergers seldom work out well for the employees of either company.
On the other hand, companies with more than 100 employees are required to give a 60-day notice of layoffs if it involves more than 500 people (or 50-499 people if that equates to at least 1/3 of their total workforce).
But the odds are that a company considering massive layoffs won’t be hiring anyway.
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I read a recent news article online (trying to find now) that “some” companies are using current economic issues to illegally layoff older employees to save costs. So while a company may announce 5,000 layoffs, the company is also quietly hiring 1,000 new employees at lower wages and limited benefits to replace 1,000 of the older employees just let go.
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In my experience, companies that are considering or have committed to layoffs have started with hiring freezes, except for positions that have been approved to be filled *in spite of *the hiring freeze.
Bringing on and ramping up new hires is expensive. To make that investment and not get the “ROI” on it would be really, really stupid.
A company that fills a position only to terminate it a short while later is a badly-managed one, indeed. They exist, but they’re not the norm.
True Beadalin, but you’re assuming the OP is applying for a highly skilled job and not one that has lots of turnover anyway and requires minimal training (say, a call center). If it’s a question between high turnover and VERY high turnover (like a complete layoff), then it’s much harder to tell with a private company. I guess one indicator would be if the reason your company is laying you off is because of bad choices they made, or if it’s industry wide. Every company is going to tell their employees and even middle management that the world is all sunshine, fairies, and unicorns up until they have layoffs because they don’t want to destroy morale or have the top performers leave at the mere threat of bad times ahead. Assuming your current company is keeping around bad product lines, expensive-to-maintain systems or customer, or other obvious-to-you red flag, the best I could recommend is to ask about similar situations (without calling them ‘red flags’) in the interview.
I’m a bit nervous about this very thing, actually. I’ve got a good job right now, but I’m interviewing for two companies which are all the way across the country. They’re both ostensibly doing fairly well… but it would really suck to make the move and then be out of work a few weeks later. If the jobs don’t fold, however, they’d each be a pretty big step up for my career.
This depends entirely on the company, the job, and the circumstances of the hypothetical layoffs. Often layoffs happen by department, sometimes a whole department gets axed in a major restructuring of a business, sometimes a few employees each from several selected departments are laid off in a quick cost-cutting measure. Very rarely are employees laid off across all departments. If you took a job as an engineer you might find out a week later that 1/2 the customer support department is getting laid off due to outsourcing or something like that. But the jobs in engineering might be rock solid because the company management has made a decision that engineering will never be outsourced. If a company is going under, stock is at an all time low, you witness employees packing their belongings and openly weeping in hallways as you walk to your interview, you might want to hedge your bets and interview at a few other places too. But more often layoffs are smaller corrective measures within perfectly profitable companies and how, where and why they are decided upon is impossible to predict without specific insider information. And odd though it might sound oftentimes layoffs and other restructuring does create new jobs. A new project manager to oversee the outsourcing of what used to be done in house, etc. You just never know.
Not always. My company had massive layoffs a few months after hiring me. I was unemployed at the time and my other job option was a much smaller company that was about to merge.
Had I been employed, I probably would have not considered either option, but I’m still here. Basically I just ended up with a better management team in place above me.
Sometimes companies restructure on a large scale, but they need to hire for individual positions. They don’t just arbitrarily decide “we need to cut X people” and walk down the halls going “duck…duck…goose” They typically have a new, more efficient (theoretically) structure in mind. Sometimes many of their current employees just don’t fit into that new vision and they need to hire from outside.
I’ve done a lot of work with H/R cost analysis and it really isn’t that expensive to hire and train people for MOST jobs.
Most of the costs that are written about are the cost to other benefits. For instance, H/R will say I had to use 80 hours to screen candidates. That’s 80 hours I could’ve used for training.
My experience has shown, these 80 hours wouldn’t have been used for anything really useful anyway.
Costs like training others can be actually less in a bad economy, because you can hire people laid off with those skills already.
I work for a temp company currently and I have actually seen them hire people knowing the company will cut back or even be sold. Yes last year I worked for a company which hired on two sales managers, an accountant and a night manager, even though there was a 99% chance the company would merge. These people were hired in November and the merger date was Jan 15th. Those people all got fired, of course no unemployment was paid out by the company, because the way it was restructured. (They made the business go bankrupt and what was an actual merger now was technically not.)
So you can’t assume anything, even in good times.
The only possibly thing you can do is negotiate at hiring for something a bit better. If there is a 90 day wait for insurance, see if they can put you on ASAP. They can ALWAYS do this. H/R will tell you it’s 100% impossible. I worked in H/R and can tell you they can make exceptions. There is always a way. That way if you get cut, you can get COBRA.
Short of that, you can ask for an additional interview with a coworker. But if you ask for too much, or get too nosy, most people will just skip to the next candidate.
Best advice is just assume you WILL be let go and keep looking for another job. Loyalty to a job is very misplaced. They’d fire you in a heartbeat if they had to.
There are cities and counties that are laying off. Can’t speak to states. I haven’t been paying close attention to them. But the housing decline has sucked a lot of property tax revenue out of local and state governments. And with governments, it’s last in, first laid off.
Not stable anymore, unless it’s federal government. I got laid off from a county government last year, and many urban planners are finding themselves to be the first in front of the firing squad when layoffs when local governments have to cut their budgets.
This is no joke. Years ago, i worked for a large multinational firm, which had a plant in orem, Utah. A friend of mine called, and aked if I could help a friend of his, with some names at this plant 9he was out of work and applying for a job there). I told him the news-that this plant was closoing in 6 months-unbleiveably, the HR resourse office was still sending out job postings! The poor guy might have relocated, only to see his job disappear!. I fear we will see a lot of this, as this recession grinds on.