From Layoffs to Loyalty: Building Alumni Networks That Work

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Jena Dunay: There are some very inexpensive things that I’ve seen organizations do that just make the person feel like a person and not just like a number, which is oftentimes what happens when layoffs happen. And layoffs sometimes have to happen. It’s just sometimes a part of an organization’s lifecycle. And so being able to do that with intentionality and being able to do that where you preserve that human dignity and make them not a number, I mean, that’s it.

David Rice: Welcome to the People Managing People podcast. We’re on a mission to build a better world of work and to help you create happy, healthy, and productive workplaces. I’m your host, David Rice. My guest today is Jena Dunay, founder of Recruit the Employer and the host of Culture Uncovered Podcast. We’re gonna be talking about layoffs, offboarding, and employer branding.

Jena, welcome.

Jena Dunay: Thank you. Thank you for having me, David. I’m a huge fan of the show and so just grateful to be on and chat all of those things that no one likes to talk about, specifically the layoff and offboarding, but I personally do, so.

David Rice: Excellent. So let’s set the stage here. When we think about layoffs, what’s the first missed or bad habit that comes to mind for you in terms of how companies typically handle them?

Jena Dunay: Well, I think we could all agree, probably not well, right? Most companies probably don’t handle them well, and I think the reason why is a big bad habit. After working with lots of different organizations of varying sizes, the biggest issue that I see is they wait till it’s almost too late, right? So they’re already down the road of going through a layoff and they have no off-boarding plan.

They have no strategy. There’s no four, there’s no thinking ahead or being proactive with that process. And while every other area of their employee lifecycle has been thought out, tedious, very meticulous. It’s the offboarding that just kind of sits over here and isn’t really fully fleshed out. And so when companies are about to go through life, they just wait till the very end.

And then you have these huge miscommunications, which cause huge problems. And not only is an issue for those people getting laid off, it’s a issue for the people that are left behind. So I’d say that’s the biggest bad habit is just waiting till it’s too.

David Rice: There’s so much emphasis on onboarding and you know, we spend hours and hours rethinking it, you know, like thinking about, well, what courses can I take to come up with new onboarding ideas?

We barely even talk about offboarding. It’s just well, they’re gone.

Jena Dunay: Yes. But what’s fascinating is do you, if you look at if you think about the employee lifecycle as a circle, right? So you have talent attraction kind of at the top. It’s where we spend a lot of our time talking about employer branding.

How do we attract the right talent? Then we recruit those people, then we onboard those people. Then we try to retain those people with professional development. And then they potentially leave. We know they’re going to probably leave at some point. It’s not the 1960s. People don’t stay at the same job for their entire lives like my grandfather did, or maybe grandparents of yours did.

They’re gonna be there for about four years. And so if we know that’s going to happen, we know that this is actually an on-ramp, perhaps back to the town attraction portion. And so if we miss this whole section of the offboarding, we don’t complete the actual employee life cycle. That circle is just kind of hanging there.

It becomes like not even a half circle.

David Rice: Yeah. Right. If we were thinking about it, like of as a actual, let’s just say an actual life cycle, it would be like once a person goes to the hospital, you just leave them for dead.

Jena Dunay: But it is, but there’s not a lot of like intentionality at that stage. And it’s such a great opportunity for HR teams, for even C-suite of organizations beyond just the HR to look at their talent strategy differently.

And if they’re able to do that really intentionally, there’s a lot of downstream positive effects that can have on the org for those that are staying and for those that end up do leaving.

David Rice: You talk about off-boarding with dignity, that was something that came up when we were chatting before this. I’m curious, what does that actually look like in practice?

Especially when like budgets are tight. Morale is low, right? It feels like it could be kind of a hard thing to do or prioritize at least.

Jena Dunay: Yeah, I think the prioritization is a huge part When you’re talking about myths or bad habits, I think it’s a lack of prioritization on this area and what sometimes with good reason, right?

You onboard people probably way more regular than you offboard people. At least that’s the hope, right? You’re not gonna be laying off a bunch of people. Hopefully very often, but when we’re talking about layoffs specifically and reductions in force, really intentionally thinking through how do we offboard so that the people that are on the receiving end of that are treated with respect and with grace on their way out.

And I’m not necessarily talking about having these massive severance packages and doing outplacement of which we do, and I do think that’s important. I actually think way more important. That is the communication strategy and the communication plan, and that doesn’t really cost anything other than time.

And so being really intentional about how you communicate, how you’re going to gracefully let these people go, making sure that everybody knows what’s going on and everybody is clear, there’s some level of transparency that’s happening for those that are going through the process and those that are let go.

There are some very inexpensive things that I’ve seen organizations do. Just make the person feel like a person and not just a number, which is oftentimes what happens when layoffs happen and layoffs sometimes have to happen. It’s just sometimes a part of an organization’s lifecycle. And so being able to do that with intentionality and being able to do that where you preserve that human dignity and make them not a number, that’s it.

David Rice: Yeah. Sometimes in the best things in life are free. They are like, I mean, no, I mean you made a great point there. ’cause I think there’s this sense of we have to throw money at any problem to fix it. But this is not even that costly of a problem to fix.

Jena Dunay: No. The communication piece of it.

Right. Does everybody know what’s happening? The people that need to know, do they know what’s happening? Is there communication already set up for those that are left behind? Is there a plan to rebuild trust? Right? Those are things that can happen along the way. Maybe there’s some ways that there, especially if it’s a smaller layoff, is there a way that we can intentionally send messages to people as encouragement on their way out?

There are very practical things that can happen. I’ve seen founders do that actually, when they had to go through a layoff and they actually wrote letters. To the individuals that had to get laid off and saying, Hey, I’m providing, I’d be happy to provide you a recommendation. I’d be happy to provide you blank.

And it’s just all these things that can actually be done that don’t cost anything to the organization other than time.

David Rice: You kinda alluded to it there, but I wanted to ask if you had an example of a company that handled offboarding particularly well or particularly badly and what can we learn from those examples?

Jena Dunay: Yeah, there’s a couple of examples that come to mind. One that was more public was actually Airbnb in 2020. So specifically around COVID and all those pieces. Their CEO did a really great job of communicating effectively what was actually going out and posted this. You can actually find it online, post exactly what was going on, you know, praise the people that were part of the organization, communicated why it was happening, and then what they actually did, which I thought was super fascinating.

I haven’t seen a lot of companies do this. They actually created an alumni directory for those people that were getting off boarded, and they utilized their recruiting team to help transition those people. So instead of letting their whole recruiting team off at the same time, they actually used them to help with resume reviews and all of the, it’s almost like an internal outplacement service for their organization, which I thought was super fascinating.

There was another organization here in the Nashville area, I live in Nashville, and their HR leader had to let go a large portion of the organization, and he was just a standup gentleman in and of himself, so I’d like to preface with that. But he ended up calling his competitors, his HR partners at competitors, and said, Hey, we had to let these people go.

I would, they’re all really amazing people. We just unfortunately can’t sustain this kind of spend that we have. I would love to set up. Kind of like these almost job fairs, if you will, for these people to meet. And a lot of those people got hired within three to six months from the competitors. So that’s just a lot of humility, a lot of grace itself.

But that’s a very practical thing that somebody has done, I think handled it well. We could just go onto LinkedIn and see how things were not handled well. But I mean, some general things are of just like cutting people out of their email, not having a chance to make any relational connection to people that they spend a large majority of their day with, or there’s just no communication at all.

Or they, you know, get, you get on a Zoom and everyone gets laid off on the Zoom. We’re not gonna do that if we care about people. And so those are kind of some differences between some positives and some negatives as well.

David Rice: Yeah. One of my favorites is find go, going to go into the office and your badge doesn’t work anymore.

Jena Dunay: Yes.

David Rice: That’s a fun one.

Jena Dunay: It’s just like always treat again, this is not a way, dignified way to treat people. We just don’t, should not be doing this.

David Rice: Well, you said something there I think is kind of powerful is like the idea of creating alumni rather than like ex-employees. Right. But that’s a mindset shift, right?

For leaders and for the organizational culture too. How do you think. We should sort of approach that in creating that conversation and that narrative if you’re an HR professional.

Jena Dunay: It comes down to not only do we win to make it a great experience for people leaving because it preserves our employer brand and all those kind of ooey, gooey things, but it actually can be a great referral source for us in attracting really top talent.

So. There’s some studies that show that like alumni of your organization are actually great referral sources for your future, you know, roles that you might have open. And so looking at it as a talent strategy, not just as a nice thing to do, but as a must have, because a beautiful part is that, you know, if you have all these alumni of your organization and they’re going out and doing great things in the world, they know really great people and they, if they have a good experience with your organization, it just wasn’t a good fit long term for whatever reason.

They could be a great source to bring people back to you. So for me, I feel like alumni strategies are not utilized enough. There are a couple of organizations that are known for doing this really well. McKinsey is one of those. Deloitte is one of those. There’s another one called Genentech. They’re in the healthcare space.

Check them out. They’re doing a really cool thing with their alumni program, and they really create a community of people that have been a part of the organization because, you know, they’re senior leadership sought as a value add and a huge, larger part of their human capital strategy. And so they’re another one that I’ve been having on my radar of wow, they’re actually doing a really cool thing.

And they see it as part of a larger picture, not just, okay, see you later. You are missing out on so much opportunity there.

David Rice: Yeah. I mean, and if you leave it well enough, you can’t. I’ve seen one, they did a thing where they had three employees who went on to work at these really big companies and do big things and they talked about, they got them to talk about the experience of work in there in their early days.

And how help them and that, I mean, that becomes an employer branding opportunity right there to talk about how like Yeah. You know, we understand this isn’t your final destination.

Jena Dunay: Yes. And I think there’s some like realness to that, right? It should be kind of a part of, in my opinion, how you gonna separate from somebody should be just as much a part of your employer branding strategy as your cool perks that you’re gonna have in your you know, retention strategy.

And so yeah, I think there’s a lot of opportunity to be had in the alumni section of the people that have been a part of your organization before, and it helps bring people potentially back to your company, which we know is actually gonna make lower cost of recruiting. Right. And it’s a higher or a faster time to ramp.

David Rice: Well, that’s a perfect segue because I was gonna bring up, yeah. The fact that we’re seeing a lot of layoffs right now where people are jumping the gun on certain technologies or thinking that they can do things that it maybe can’t. And then they end up having to bring folks back and they’re creating like Boomerang employees, right?

So, you know, I’m curious you, like, why is that becoming a trend and then what is it that’s gonna break that dynamic?

Jena Dunay: Yeah.

David Rice: Or make it.

Jena Dunay: Yeah. Yeah. So I think a couple of things. I actually love the idea of a Boomerang employee, not only just for organizations, but for individuals as well. Because when you take some time perhaps away from the organization, it gives you a different perspective of, you know, what you’re interested in, what you’re really good at for the organizations, it does, it creates a faster ramp time.

It’s lower cost to acquire those folks. They need less training ’cause they’re used to the culture and the language that’s spoken within the organization. The things that I would caution organizations on when they’re thinking about Boomerang employees is really understanding why they left and why they came back.

Now, if it’s a part of a layoff, that’s an obvious, but if it’s a voluntary leave, right? Why did they leave and why are they interested in coming back so that it doesn’t create a huge amount of disruption for those that have stayed within? Right? You can see some friction that could potentially happen there.

But in terms of the boomerang and how, why they are interested in coming back, it’s because if an organization does a really good job with offboarding them and leaving where you’re not burning any bridges, as we like to say, if you’re not burning any bridges in the process other than being, having to leave for whatever reason.

It’s a great on-ramp to bring that person on and for them to feel comfortable faster for them. It’s almost like the devil, you know, versus the devil you don’t. And so you know what you’re getting yourself into because you’ve been there before. Maybe cultures change, which it naturally can over time as organizations grow and evolve, but it can be a great solution for people that are in the job search and if there’s an optionality for folks to go back into the organization.

That’s a win-win. I mean, I’ve left organizations before and I think fondly about every single one of those separations from my perspective, even ones where I got let go from, because the founder said, if we ever have a place for you in the future, we would love to rehire you. That already made me feel like I got my dignity back during the layoff process.

And then for those where I’ve voluntarily left. They said, we would love to rehire you if you should ever need a job in the future. We’d love to stay in contact. And that also made me feel a good feeling towards the organization, even though I left for pretty good reasons. Right.

David Rice: Yeah, no, I agree. I’ve had it in the past where I left, you know, voluntarily ’cause I was moving on to other things or just wanted a new challenge and you know, they said some really nice things on my way out where it felt like I would always be welcome and if there was ever an opportunity where we could find a way to come together again and yeah, it leaves you with a feeling of well, there was no mistakes made here for once, you know?

Jena Dunay: Yes, right. Good words. Again, they don’t cost anything. They just cost time.

David Rice: Yeah. And you have no regrets. You’re like, well, you know, it’s still there if I, if, you know, I find an opportunity here again. But yeah it’s a nice feeling for ’cause leaving a job is always uncomfortable, whether you chose it or not, so.

Jena Dunay: Yeah, there’s always a transition time for both the organization and the individual. And that’s normal too.

David Rice: Yeah, I would agree. Now when companies look to rehire somebody, they laid off, you mentioned it there about the original offboarding experience, sort of influencing their willingness to return.

But I guess what would be your advice to think about framing the idea of them coming back.

Jena Dunay: Yeah. Well, I think part of it is, again, staying in contact with those people that have left in some way, shape or form or keeping them in your ecosystem. And so making that a normal part of, again, it’s a mindset shift away from looking at these people as ex-employees as numbers and looking at as some human beings and alumni of your organization that carry on.

The brand loyalty and the employer brand that you have fostered. So I think it’s, it is a mindset shift that I think organizations need to make. But you know, if you’ve just laid off somebody, it’s probably not wise to be like, Hey, you know, we’ll hire you back in three months. Probably not the best move.

But if we’re doing these things intentionally, if we’re providing resources, if we are creating a plan, if we’re not thinking about offboarding to the very last minute, and we can be intentionally individualized throughout the process of offboarding, you have a much higher chance of that individual wanting to come back than if you did none of those things.

Right? I think it’s so important that individualized attention that you could potentially give. Here’s one thing I’ll say. I was talking, we do out placement, and I was talking to a leader who ended up using our services, which we’re grateful for. He said something when he was asking for some advice around, you know, they had to let some people go, obviously.

And you know, am I blocking off my whole day to kind of talk to these people individually? And I said, well, yes. Yes, you are going to block off your day to talk to these individuals because they deserve to have a real conversation, especially at the size of the organization was at. So it does take time from the leaders that have to administer those conversations, but it is the most human thing you can do is to have a real human conversation that this does not, we need to downscale some things as much as possible.

And be individualized and human as much as possible.

David Rice: Absolutely. A bit of a wild card question for you. This is one ’cause I’m building a, this layoff impact calculator, right? So it’s sort of, is meant to be like a thought exercise. Now it takes into account obviously the financial impact of a layoff, but it’s also trying to calculate sort of morale impacts the, some of the, you know, operational impacts that are gonna come out of it.

And so, when we talk about Boomerang employees and sort of returnability, is there a way that, in your opinion, that you can kind of score that a little bit?

Jena Dunay: In terms of if they’re more likely to return?

David Rice: Yeah.

Jena Dunay: Probably during a layoff, but I think that would be really hard to kind of, yes, I do think so, but I think you’d have to do a lot of data that you might not be able to get during that offboarding process.

David Rice: Ah, okay.

Jena Dunay: Do you know what I’m saying? So like you could see like how was your experience of getting let go? Like you’re not probably gonna ask those people that, but that would help at this point. Not during it. Yeah. Right. Like it’s just kind of awkward. But you could probably look at, okay, if we provide this, if we provide this, if we provide this, what’s the likelihood of this individual kind of returning back that you could probably do some calculations around?

But it’s probably not gonna be exactly scientific.

David Rice: No. And you know, that’s the thing is a lot of this isn’t because. We think, you know, oh, well, I’ll plug in these numbers around things like role criticality. Yeah. Well that can be subjective. Yeah. And actually a lot of it is when you really get down to it, it is subjective.

I mean, it’s based on performance reviews a lot of times that are old and that we’re subjective to begin with. So, yeah, I think a lot of it does get kind of stuck in this. This is not concrete, this is sort of based on general consensus, kinda thing.

Jena Dunay: Well, I think would be interesting would be to even expand the model from just layoff specific to offboarding in general.

Because there’s people think of off-boarding as just layoffs of reductions in force. No, it could be voluntary. It could be performance related, which is a separate piece. Right? It could be succession planning. Internally, they get off boarded to a different part of the company or retirement even. So there’s different ways to look at off-boarding.

It’s not just letting people go. It’s kind of those five cases that an organization needs to really pay attention to and how it could impact the bottom line.

David Rice: Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned re like retirement ’cause like change of life circumstances. Maybe you had a kid, or you just exactly wanted to start a business, whatever it is. But to leave that door open is very important.

Jena Dunay: Yes, agreed.

David Rice: Thanks for coming on again, sharing some of this stuff about offboarding. I love the, I love this conversation.

Before we go, there’s always a couple of things that we like to do before we tie a bow on the podcast. And the first thing is we’ll give you a chance to tell people where they can learn more about you, connect with you, find out what you have going on.

Jena Dunay: Yeah, so the two places would be our website, recruittheemployer.com. So we specialize in coming alongside HR teams when they go through their biggest people transitions with from onboarding to offboarding and really specialize in the offboarding side of things. So, if you’re experiencing or thinking about, Hey, I wanna tune up my offboarding strategy so that if and when the time comes, we actually are much more prepared and can preserve our employees and our employer brand.

We’d love to chat and I am very active on LinkedIn. And so if you wanna connect with me over on LinkedIn, my name is Jena Dunay. I post probably too much to my husband would say on LinkedIn. And I post about the podcast you mentioned, Cultured Uncovered, where we go behind the scenes of really cool companies to work for of all different sizes and industries.

So yeah, we’d love to see you there.

David Rice: Awesome. Oh, hey, you know, it doesn’t matter what he thinks. It matters what the algorithm thinks. All right?

Jena Dunay: Which the algorithm hates me right now, I will say. It’s not my friend.

David Rice: Don’t worry. It hates all of us right now.

Jena Dunay: What is going on?

David Rice: None of us know what’s going on. If it’s not like a personal opinion or pictures of your dog, no one’s gonna see it.

Jena Dunay: Oh, a hundred percent. My, my kids always get a really great response. Anything that’s like thought leadership just goes, it’s tanks.

David Rice: My pets kill it. My actual thoughts, my professional opinion, worthless. So.

Jena Dunay: So good.

David Rice: Well, the last thing that we do on every episode that I always like to include is a little tradition. You get to ask me a question, so I’ll just turn it on over to you, ask me anything.

Jena Dunay: So this is kind of a great segue that I was actually gonna ask you about LinkedIn. I was gonna get your opinion about where do you think LinkedIn is and is going, especially as us as talent leaders and people that are in the talent space.

We live a lot of our life on LinkedIn. Like where do you think LinkedIn is going? Do you think it’s gonna become an influencer space?

David Rice: Yeah, I do. To be honest with you, I think it’s like already pretty much gone that way. Yeah. We’re starting to see less and less of people’s sort of importance on the work.

Please. The other thing is if we actually ever make this move towards skills-based recruiting and work, right? Yeah. LinkedIn’s actually a really terrible place to go looking. It’s made to capture a person’s work history and talent in a very traditional, almost resume focused way. Right.

And it’s not built like a digital portfolio space or a place to show off like interactive elements that you’ve created and you think about the stuff that we’re creating. Now as a creative, I can’t show that on LinkedIn. I just have to give you a link and you go check it out. But that, I can’t really give you that on LinkedIn.

And so I think it’s sort of limited in terms of like how people are gonna. Recruit in the future. And if I, you know, I had one expert I was talking to and she was talking about Web3 in the future, and I am, I didn’t, I’m like, I still don’t mean my brain. My yeah. I dunno what that means. Still can’t quite grasp what you’re talking about.

But, you know, but yeah, as we move into the future, like I think it is going to be sort of like a thing of the past in terms of how people look for talent. Unless it’s executive talent.

Jena Dunay: Yeah, that’s fair. I think that’s fair.

David Rice: I think executive talent will still have a space on there because how do you recruit an executive?

You don’t really need a portfolio. You need to know what they think, you know how they think, how they express themselves. Well, all of that is on shining display on LinkedIn, right?

Jena Dunay: Yeah. Well, I think that’s true. So when we work with people when they’re going through the transition, we talk about how being on and providing your own thought leadership can actually be a recruiting tool at that executive level.

And even sometimes for junior level people, depending on where they are. Giving that thought leadership, you’re gonna have to do that. You’re gonna have to do that to stay competitive in the future landscape. So that’s interesting. I loved your opinion on that. I love to ask people.

David Rice: I think even for like second level managers, yeah, you’ll see it.

They’ll start looking at it like, well, what do they post on there? What are their opinions? What are they saying on other people’s posts? Because it will, it does tell them something about not only who you are, but how you communicate when you feel like it’s worth weighing in and what’s not worth weighing in on, you know?

So I think all of that will play more of a role, but yeah, it is turning into a little bit of an influencer thing and like I get sucked into that all the time. Yeah. You see the stuff I’m posting, I’ve got these like videos and shorts and all these different things and it’s fun, but it’s it’s like you look at it and having been on LinkedIn for a decade, you know, you know, you’re like, or more, you know, you’re looking at it like what do we do?

What is this exactly? This doesn’t have this platform. It doesn’t have the same purpose anymore. It’s purpose has evolved into this other thing. And now I gotta take a selfie. Yeah, but don’t smile.

Jena Dunay: But don’t smile. I can’t do the non-selling selfies. You’ll never find me do a non-selling selfie. If you do, it’s me being uncomfortable, so.

David Rice: You’re probably not gonna see like a selfie of me and it’s just like me in a room or in a parking lot or something. Like I will be on top of a mountain. Or something going on in the background or my pets are involved, but it’s not just gonna be like my face clear, blurry background. Hi.

Jena Dunay: Yeah.

David Rice: Not gonna happen, so.

Jena Dunay: I’m with you. It feels inauthentic and I can’t. I have a hard time with that. Yeah.

David Rice: Alright, well Jena, thanks for coming on today. Love that question by the way.

Jena Dunay: Yeah, yeah.

David Rice: It was nice having you.

Jena Dunay: Thank you for having me. And I’m super excited that we got to share some things about offboarding ’cause people don’t talk about it enough. So thanks for having me.

David Rice: Well listeners, if you haven’t done so already, head on over to peoplemanagingpeople.com/subscribe. Sign up for the newsletter, you’ll get all the latest podcasts, news about our upcoming events all straight to your inbox. So be sure to sign up for that.

And until next time, you know, take good real selfies. Okay?

Jena Dunay: Yeah, take good real selfies.

David Rice: And then put ’em on LinkedIn because that’s the future.