Things to do when you get laid off

With many well-known and successful organisations turning to mass layoffs for cost cutting, the current market scenario has become a bit disheartening. On one hand, it causes layoff anxiety among the surviving employees. And on the other hand, it brings confusion, chaos, and unforeseen challenges to the ones being laid off.

If you are among the people who have recently lost their jobs, do not panic. Yes, it is easier said than done, especially for people who are supporting their families and the ones who do not have a good financial situation.

However, staying calm and processing the situation first is the only way to survive this hurdle and thrive in your career.

Here are a couple of tips which can help you in dealing with a layoff and move ahead in a fruitful manner:

Keep calm and reflect

As discussed earlier, it doesn't help anyone to panic.

Instead, what you can do is take a day or more to process this news and understand what it means for your career as well as your financial situation. Based on this, you can evaluate how much time you can take to grab your next employment opportunity. Post the evaluation, you can plan and start your job search process.

Evaluate your options

If you need to urgently grab the next job, you must start with tracking down opportunities, customise your resume to each opening, and start applying for the same. However, if you can take some time, you can utilise this time to reflect on your learnings so far as well as ponder over the next career step for you. For some, it could be exploring entrepreneurship, pursuing higher education, switching their fields, or upgrading their skillset, and for others, it could be simply taking a small career break and then pursuing better opportunities.

Update your resume and professional profile

In order to begin with your job hunt, the first step you need to do is update your resume, cover letter, as well as professional profiles like LinkedIn, GitHub, Behance, etc. with your updated skill-set, projects undertaken, and experience. In addition to updating the aforementioned, you would also need to tailor each for specific jobs and organisations you'll be applying for based on their requirements for specific skills or experience. This will help you get an edge and stand out among other applicants.

Leverage online recruitment portals and your professional network

While a lot of companies are letting go of their employees, many others are actively hiring too. Here, to get the most relevant and promising opportunities, you can leverage the online recruitment portals which are increasingly being used by recruiters to quickly fill in their job vacancies.

You can also reach out to your professional network of people you have worked with, connected with for work, or connected through your LinkedIn network. Your network could help you in tracking down relevant job leads as well as help you get referrals to the opportunities.

One learning from the current circumstances for all of us is to understand the uncertainty of everything. In order to be capable of dealing with such unforeseen challenges, we must plan our careers and finances well so that such downturns do not impact our as well as our families' lives adversely. And so that we are capable of accepting the situation and move ahead towards other and better opportunities.

(The writer is the founder and CEO, Internshala, a recruitment and training platform)