In March, I joined the list of people who've been laid off from a Fortune 500 company in what became one of the larger single-day workforce reductions I'd seen.
I'd been there five months. The week before, I'd had a performance review where I got a salary increase, a bonus, and a promise of a headcount expansion by year's end. My manager didn't know what was coming. Her manager didn't either. When the call with HR came, it lasted about four minutes.
The terms were straightforward: stay on payroll through June with no work obligations, use the time to look for internal opportunities, and collect a severance package at the end if nothing internal worked out. I spent the first hour in a kind of fog. The second hour I was already emailing my manager and her manager to figure out what internal options might exist.
The internal search went nowhere. The NJ office had almost nothing, and the opportunities that did exist required relocating to the company's central campus — not something I was willing to do. By the end of my first week I was fully focused on the external market.
Two months later I had two director-level offers, both from companies I was genuinely excited about. The series I'm writing shares exactly what happened between that first HR call and the moment I signed. Not because my path is the only path, but because there's a lot of vague advice out there about job searching — and I think concrete, specific experience is more useful than general tips.
If you're going through a layoff right now, I want you to know that two months is a long time if you use it right. The job search I'm describing required sustained, uncomfortable effort. But it worked.
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