Laid Off Tech Workers Are Having No Trouble Finding New Jobs

It was just hours ago that we wrote about how restaurant staffing was returning to pre-pandemic levels and, in what we’re sure is totally not a coincidence, it also appears that laid off tech workers are having no trouble finding new jobs. 

According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal, the job market apparently hasn’t softened enough just yet: tech workers are finding jobs “shortly after beginning their search” despite the tightening job market.

The 10.3 million job openings across the economy still “far exceeds” the number of unemployed Americans, the report noted.

Ergo, 79% of workers who were laid off or terminated found new work within three months, the report says. About 40% of workers found new jobs less than a month after being terminated or laid off from the tech jobs, according to data from ZipRecruiter.

Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter, told the Journal: “Despite the widespread layoffs, hiring freezes, and cost-cutting taking place in tech, many tech workers are finding reemployment remarkably quickly. They’re still the most sought-after workers with the most in-demand skills.” 

The report noted that a smaller share of workers in tech are spending long periods of time searching for new opportunities:

About 5% of laid off tech workers who found jobs from April to October had spent more than six months hunting for work, down from 26% of those hired between August 2021 and February 2022, ZipRecruiter said.

One 23 year old former videographer, who was fired and then able to land a new job within two months, told WSJ: ““When I was applying, to be honest, I didn’t feel very confident because there was such an influx of competition with a lot of people also being laid off.”

But he was able to land a social media manager job at a software startup under 3 months from being laid off. “I was surprised at how quickly I was able to secure an offer for a job,” he said of the new opportunity. 

Ryan Sutton, district president at Robert Half, a global recruitment firm added: “We’ve definitely seen a slowdown in hiring, but the reason why is that the job creation level was beyond record highs because of the slingshot effect of the pandemic. From August 2020 to May 2022, it wasn’t red-hot. It was lava-hot.”

He said the “usual” occurrence of laid off tech workers contacting his company for placement hasn’t happened. “We have not seen it yet—we haven’t seen more candidates coming to market. Our recruiters are having to hunt and hustle just as much as they had to in the last couple of years,” he concluded.  

And it appears the bounce back for laid off workers isn’t just limited to tech. Workers in other industries, such as transportation and delivery, were also able to find new jobs easily, the Journal concluded. You can read their full report here.