OTTAWA — Raza Khan landed a job at Toronto-based foodtech startup ResQ in February last year just before a wave of layoffs in the broader sector was beginning to pick up. By May, his employer cut about 10 per cent of its workforce, and Khan lost his new job just months after he started.

“They treated me with a lot of humanity when they laid me off,” said Khan. “The CEO personally called me and let me know it wasn’t my fault, and then both my manager and the CEO tried to make connections for me with their personal network where they could. So, I had a couple of interviews for opportunities that way.”

He looked over a couple of offers before joining the website software company Webflow as a business operations manager in August.

Experts say HR departments have stepped up efforts to help laid off employees make new connections in the hiring and firing waves of recent years. Tech companies let go of over 160,000 workers worldwide in 2022, and more than 223,400 so far in 2023, according to website layoffs.fyi. More companies are also considering ways to protect their reputations during layoffs to ensure smooth recruiting efforts in the future, as some employees return to their old jobs.

A survey of 258 individuals—where four in five respondents had been laid off—by learning and networking platform The Commons, found that tech workers valued perks that could help them land their next job in a severance package. The Commons’s head of growth Alexandra Palmer said the top ask from tech workers was still extended pay and benefits, but the second, third and fourth most popular demands were job and network introductions, mentorship and a learning budget.

Money is the “number one thing” when it comes to severance packages, said Lior Samfiru, a Toronto-based employment lawyer and co-managing partner of Samfiru Tumarkin LLP. “The reality is that the employer often is looking to pay as little as they can, and the employee is looking to get as much as possible.” Although it’s rare that the two parties can bridge a significant gap in monetary expectations, employers will use non-cash compensation such as outplacement counselling and additional training for tech job skills as a compromise. “Sometimes that’s the icebreaker or the middle ground,” he said.

One way employers help laid off workers link up with a new job is by circulating spreadsheets with affected workers’ professional and contact information, said Stefan Gonzales, an account executive at Vancouver-based tech recruitment company IT/IQ. He pointed out a Thinkific spreadsheet when the software company laid off 100 workers last March. Other companies like Wealthsimple and recruiters have done the same. “A lot of those people were scooped up probably within a month or so of the layoff,” he said.

For companies, referrals and placement efforts may also help future talent recruitment, or re-hiring employees they previously let go. “If you are known as the company who was really brutal in layoffs—we’ve seen this happen lots of times in the news, especially with tech companies—you’re not going to attract the best talent or they’re not going to want to work for you,” said Palmer. 

Employers could build a bad reputation by intentionally shortchanging employees out of the severance they are owed, while some also might not understand employment law. “A lot of employers, unfortunately, almost count on their employees not knowing [the employer’s] obligations,” said Samfiru. “Because of that, the employees will accept inadequate severance.”

There were layoffs in 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, but companies saw “boomerang” workers return in 2021 and 2022 when the tech boom kicked in, said Jamie Savage, founder of Toronto-based headhunting agency The Leadership Agency. “If people want to boomerang back, that’s because you’ve fostered a culture that people want to come back to,” she said.

Those most likely to “boomerang back” are alumni with institutional knowledge, said Gonzales. Sometimes a company will lay employees off with an eye to potentially hiring them back when the financial situation improves. If that’s the case, an employer can build goodwill by agreeing to recognize a worker’s past service so they don’t burn bridges with each other, said Samfiru.

As someone who has been laid off before, Khan said he’ll be more prepared if he’s affected again. “I’m very aware of the realities of how the market is, and I’m always thinking I might get laid off again,” he said.