Recode spoke with over half a dozen tech professionals who never regularly used the platform but are suddenly finding it more relevant for their professional and even personal lives. People are sharing their personal layoff stories more prominently on LinkedIn, especially if they’re tech workers. For the most part, though, the professional social networking site has long had a reputation for being a place where people go to boast about their career accomplishments, posting “ hustle porn” and inspirational platitudes. It’s true that, early in the pandemic, many people turned to LinkedIn to share stories about how lockdown was negatively impacting their jobs. In the past several months, as changing economic conditions, overhiring, and stock market drops have led to mass layoffs in tech, media, and other industries, vulnerability is having a moment on LinkedIn. “It was an unwritten assumption before that job-seeking has to be as private as possible” Not hiring managers,” said Fishman, who said he had six job interviews in the two weeks after being laid off - and all of those opportunities came from LinkedIn.

“It was complete and total LinkedIn strangers.

The post ended up getting more than 40,000 views, nearly 500 likes, and, most surprisingly, a bunch of offers of support from people he’d never met. When Rob Fishman, a former account executive at a tech startup, was laid off in January, he wasn’t sure how to talk about it.Įven though tens of thousands of tech employees at startups like his - and at major tech companies like Google, Meta, and Microsoft (which owns LinkedIn) - were being laid off, there was still, he said, a stigma attached to talking about it.īut he wanted people to know he was in the market for a new job, so he decided to post on LinkedIn.įishman wrote a lighthearted, self-deprecating post listing out everything he did on the day he was let go (For instance, read the email that he was laid off, call his fiancé, wallow in self-pity for a while, drink a large margarita, drink another large margarita, edit his résumé).

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