Meta laid off 11,000 people. Twitter cut roughly half its workforce. Amazon is reportedly cutting 10,000. Salesforce, Stripe, Lyft, Snap. The list goes on and it's growing weekly. And I keep thinking about employer brand, because it's about to matter more than it ever has.
Here's what I mean. For the last decade, tech companies built employer brands around a specific promise: join us and you'll be part of a mission, treated like family, given incredible perks, and never have to worry about stability because we're growing forever. Free lunch. Unlimited PTO. Your dogs are welcome. We're not just a company. We're a community.
For the last decade, tech companies built employer brands around a specific promise: join us and you'll be part of a mission, treated like family, given incredible perks, and never have to worry about stability because we're growing forever.
Lululemon's ambassador program doesn't pay athletes millions. It empowers local fitness instructors. The brand is built from the yoga studio floor up, not the broadcast booth down.
That contract just got ripped up in front of everyone watching.
And I don't say that to be dramatic. Layoffs happen. They're sometimes necessary. But the WAY these layoffs have been conducted reveals the gap between employer brand promise and organizational reality.
Twitter employees found out they were fired when their access was revoked. Meta sent a mass email. Some people learned about their layoff from the press before their manager told them. The same companies that spent millions on employer branding, on culture decks, on EVP workshops, couldn't be bothered to treat departing employees with basic dignity.
This matters for future hiring. Not today, maybe not next quarter, but within two years when these companies need to hire again (and they will), the people they want to recruit will remember this. Not just the people who were laid off. Everyone watching. And everyone is watching, because everyone in tech now knows someone affected.
From a brand strategy perspective, employer brand has always been treated as marketing's neglected sibling. The consumer brand gets the big budget, the creative agency, the Super Bowl spots. The employer brand gets a careers page refresh and maybe some Glassdoor management. But employer brand IS consumer brand, because employees are your most visible brand ambassadors. When 11,000 people suddenly become former employees with feelings about how they were treated, those are 11,000 people telling your brand story without your permission or control.
The companies that handle this moment well will have an enormous advantage in the next hiring cycle. And "handling it well" isn't complicated: be honest about why it's happening, give people adequate notice and severance, help them find new jobs, and treat the process with the same care you'd want if it were happening to you.
Some companies are getting this right. Stripe's CEO wrote a letter that took personal responsibility and offered generous severance. Airbnb's 2020 layoffs remain the gold standard for how to let people go with dignity. These examples stand out precisely because they're rare.
My advice to any company going through this: your employer brand is being built right now, whether you're thinking about it or not. Every departing employee is going to talk about this experience for years. Every remaining employee is watching how you treat their former colleagues and calibrating their own loyalty accordingly. This is not an HR problem. It's a brand problem. And it deserves brand-level attention.
The family metaphor was always a lie. Now everyone knows it. The brands that acknowledge this and build something more honest in its place will be better for it. The ones that resume the family talk as soon as hiring resumes will be exposed as frauds.