Show HN: Layoffs.at – helping people laid off find work

Great questions.

Yes. The job seekers are more desirable to sourcing teams if they are systematically filtered to be sincere about taking a new role, local, and experienced in a given role. Layoffs tend to produce a gold mine in that respect from a talent acquisition perspective.

Good point on fragmentation seeming counterproductive. It certainly is, but that’s the way it is since different candidates and different employers have different preferences (e.g. an engineer might prefer maintaining GitHub over LinkedIn, so sourcers can’t just use LinkedIn). Also, people who have been laid off tend to value a specific package of help — not just job leads, but also resume reviews, fast-track processes, and sometimes creative (non-traditional / part-time) leads that fill any potential gap.

> I'm confused. Is there some aspect about a person being laid off that makes them more/less desirable that they need a specific service to help them find a new job?

Yes. There are stigmas. People solve this by just having their perpetual consulting company on their resume, or put back on their resume when convenient. There is bargaining power when you can feign disinterest, as in you're 'open to opportunities' but not 'looking for a job I'll start next week' like a new college grad. Less relevant for engineers in this job market but not irrelevant.

> Also seeing a trend of niche job websites popping up... Fragmentation in this industry seems counterproductive.

But that buyout isn't counterproductive.

Also recruiters either earn a tiny referral bonus or like 20% of the agreed upon salary. The company doesn't pay it from the employee's salary, they just pay that additional amount equivalent to what 20% of the salary is.

The value-add from this service, I'm assuming, is less on the candidate side and more on the company side.

For context, it is really hard for companies to build a pipeline of candidates for technical roles. If your hiring for a technical role, 99% of the ideal candidates you'd like to hire are already employed.

Big layoffs at tech companies release a ton of qualified, immediately-employable technical candidates into the market all at once. For recruiters, and 3rd party recruiting platforms like this one, these candidates represent a massive opportunity. Any engineer who has been laid off in a big round has had to deal with marketing/outreach from recruiters and recruiting platforms (Hired, AngelList, Vettery, etc.)

From what I see, this platform won't give you, as a candidate, any advantage another platform won't.

There will be an about today.

As a company, we work closely with those laid off to help them find their next job. We don't charge candidates for this service.

Given our extremely technical backgrounds, we can help people and companies based strongly on technical experience, past projects, and future interests. We understand how important it is to work on not just exciting projects, but interesting technology.

We feel like keeping a very niche focus allows us to do a fantastic job at helping candidates find their next job. It will enable us to work closely with the candidates and work on a process that can eventually scale.

> Does 'high profile' matter? Not at all. There's really no discrimination based on how big company or layoff is, we'll work with you. This was placed here to appeal to companies. We want to create as much "liquidity" as possible to help people bounce back.

I would love feedback on what do you think would be a better phrase?

> doesn't The Market love a layoff? The market does love layoffs; but there's no centralized place for companies and candidates to find one another. That's what we provide. We'll also help in the process if you like.

When I was younger, I went through this process and really wished I had someone to help me through it. Watching all of these recent layoffs made me want to do something about it.

If there's anything you feel like could be done to help those affected by layoffs, I would love to hear it.

Thank you for your feedback!

I agree high profile shouldn’t matter, but it helps to grab the attention of recruiters who often pay attention to high-profile consumer companies like “Uber” but not to smaller, more enterprise-facing startups. It’s not necessarily a logical disconnect, but it is real.

Sorry, it's not a data mining effort. We're taking sign-ups now and will start scheduling calls with people. To best help us, getting some information makes this process move faster.

Thanks bkfunk. All — I launched layoff-aid.com for SF tech talent in 2017. Love the initiative here and happy to help push it forward or do whatever else I can to better solve the problem. Email is Adam@ , mention HN

Recruiting is a big, fat, inefficient market. If you have N people contacting M companies, and M companies contacting N people, there's a whole lot of inefficiency there. Then you have ridiculous interview processes, a lack of communication about how to improve all around, overloaded in-house recruiters who get swamped and work below peak efficiency, high costs to access premium services like job posting & LinkedIn, and so on. Eventually you throw your hands up and pay big fat fees to people who send you candidates. Any nominal optimization or gimmick can charge a lot of money. Eventually someone will figure out a way to remove all the friction and drive the cost of hiring the old way down.

We're not a recruiting firm, and we'll make this distinction very clear on the website soon.

The primary purpose of the website is to help people bounce back from being laid off. Given this is our primary mission, we don't do the following:

- We don't charge companies a % of a candidate's salary. This feels dirty to us, and it's not in the candidate's best interest. - We don't prevent companies from discovering people who have been laid off. Profiles on the website will be visible to companies, much like LinkedIn.

Since we're technical, we want to speak with you. Understand your background, technical expertise, and what you're looking to work on.

We are focusing on a niche market and this allows us to focus our energy on actually speaking to each candidate in-depth about their technical experience; we'll be able to represent you and get you that interview quicker.

Some areas feel easy to fake-innovation-as-consulting due to high throughout or concierge: recruiting, ads, etc. You do a normal job, maybe handhold, and market with something fresh. Can get some level of sales proportional to marketing and services effort. But ultimately nothing truly differentiating or sticky vs the next AI/niche/whatever startup, and investors move on as the startup fails to keep growing past $1M/$10m/whatever. The consultancy/services gets bought at consultancy/services-level terms for consultancy/services-level value.

It took me awhile to notice the pattern of businesses that can get to some revenue quickly, but hit a ceiling soon after. Sample sign: a few top principals are drive most of the early deal value, and revenue scales at bad multiples after them.

Thanks for pointing this out. This was fixed.

Another: "We connected you with great companies looking for you!"

Should probably be revised to something like: "We connect you with great companies, who are looking for great workers like you!"

Or something more simple, like: "We connect great companies with fantastic workers!"

Thank you! Updated and rolling out now.

Interesting - the server seems to be responding. What browser/os?