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When Michelle Valera got a last-minute meeting request at work last week, she immediately whipped out her phone.
She recorded herself on TikTok reading the email, sent from someone up the corporate ladder at her real estate marketing firm: “Michelle, I am scheduling this mandatory meeting to discuss an important and time-sensitive business update with you. I’d appreciate if you made time for it.”
Turning back to the camera, she cracks a joke. “So, am I getting fired or is this something my boss doesn’t know about?”
At the time, Valera, 28, of Orlando, really thought she’d be fine. She’d just gotten great performance review feedback from her manager, who assured that the surprise meeting would be OK.
Minutes later, Valera called her manager back: She was, in fact, being let go, along with several other people at her company. And the next day, Valera posted a follow-up video of her reaction to the news, tears and all.
Connection, catharsis and a ‘horror movie’ come to life
Among the young workers being laid off en masse throughout tech, finance and media (The Great Termination, as some people are calling it), filming a TikTok reaction video is quickly becoming part of the post-layoff checklist, somewhere between texting your friends the news and getting locked out of your work email.
It’s kind of like more unfiltered (and sometimes messier) version of the LinkedIn layoff post that gained steam throughout the last year. And it’s a sharp turn from viewing a layoff as something to be embarrassed about and keep private.
Young workers aren’t staying quiet. Massive swings in job security and remote-work isolation through the pandemic means they’re taking to places like TikTok for career advice, to vent about corporate life, and, now, to commiserate about the downturns.
“People go online because they want to have this sense of camaraderie or connection with other people,” says Angela Hall, a professor of human resources and labor relations at Michigan State University.
Many young workers are using the platform to process their feelings, especially when they receive the news at while working from home and don’t have colleagues or friends nearby to vent with.
Valera says she decided to upload her post-layoff reaction as a sort of coping mechanism and says it’s kind of funny in a twisted way. She’s always been the sort of person to find humor in tough situations, she says. And by putting it out in the public, she hopes to help other laid-off workers see it that way: “You can cry and sulk and be sad and depressed and have it take a toll on your mental health, or you can sit down feel what you need to feel, laugh and go with the next best thing you can do — which for me, now, is finding a new job.”
If not for connection, viewers may flock to these layoff reaction TikToks hoping to calm their own anxieties about layoffs. “The same way we like to watch horror movies, when you see something horrible happening [onscreen], it helps you demystify it and get over your own fears of it,” says Hall. Seeing one of your biggest fears play out for someone else “softens the whole idea of it” and allows you to see that you could handle it, too.
“We feel a level of catharsis when we watching someone going through something,” Hall continues. “A layoff is a bad thing, but then we see they’re still there, they still have their head attached, and it’s not the end of the world. It makes you feel like, ‘If this happens to me, I can go through it as well.'”
Help in the job search
In the Bay Area, Alejandra Hernandez, 37, has been building her personal brand by vlogging on TikTok since the summer of 2022. So when she was laid off from Meta in November, she didn’t see a reason to stop filming her days: “This is my life now, you might as well see it,” she says.
“I went to TikTok because I was processing in the moment what was happening,” she says. She also wanted to show other people what happens when you’re laid off — an experience often shrouded in shame and isolation.
In hindsight, Hernandez is glad she started posting layoff and unemployment videos on TikTok now that more people are going through it. She often gets positive comments from people who say her videos help motivate them to keep at the job search in today’s volatile market.
There’s been a professional benefit, too: Recruiters will comment on videos inviting Hernandez, and anyone else in the comments, to connect on LinkedIn or apply for a job at their company.
For Jordan Gibbs, 31, the decision to vlog her layoff from Lyft in November was more of an “impulse” and “a way to hold myself accountable so I don’t just wallow in my own self-loathing.” She committed to filming every day of her unemployment journey, from filing for jobless benefits to creating a job-search spreadsheet and through the countless interviews she landed in the aftermath.
Her second unemployment video, a day-in-the-life clip, racked up over 300,000 views, and her follower count swelled by the thousands. Though she never thought she’d find an audience, she decided the vlog would also help keep her accountable to viewers who were going through their own layoffs and wanted to commiserate and share tips.
“I got comments saying, ‘I’m also going through a layoff, and this is helping me not feel like a loser today,'” Gibbs says.
More than two months, 173 job applications, 42 interviews and 2 rejections later, she accepted an offer in January and will start a new job in February.
One of the biggest lessons she learned through her layoff was being OK with receiving help, Gibbs says, whether it was in the form of $5 from a friend to get coffee or words of encouragement and job leads from strangers on the internet.
“Being OK with receiving really saved me during this,” Gibbs says. “If I had to do this alone, I would’ve failed a long time ago.”
Check out:
Sharing your layoff on LinkedIn isn’t an ‘act of shame’ anymore—and it could be a smart career move
After the Great Resignation and quiet quitting, the era of ‘loud layoffs’ is here
Amid mass layoffs, the Big Tech dream job is losing its luster
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