Hiring After Major Layoffs? Here’s What To Do!

The coronavirus pandemic hit us all pretty hard. But it hit harder on those that lost their jobs in multitudes. Many companies laid off batches of employees in one go to recover losses and cut costs majorly. This has had a negative impact on many employees that are struggling to find new jobs and restart their careers.

Right from the start of 2022 until now, the effects of widespread layoffs are being felt harshly by employees that are stepping from interview to interview. At Verifacts, having experience working for giants and smaller enterprises alike, we are noticing a pattern of misinformation in profiles after major layoffs.

Many candidates, when they apply for jobs, do not mark the correct end dates for their last job experience, despite having been laid off many months earlier. Some are genuine mistakes, but some profiles, majority of them are intentionally misinforming details to prospective employers. Falsifying this information sometimes gets caught
under the radar, and on some days it is missed and a wrongful hire takes place.

Why do candidates do this? While many are confident about explaining their unemployment duration, there are some candidates that consider this a shameful setback and lie on their profiles. They want to appear as already employed so that a prospective employer desires to poach them away, instead of looking desperate for a job or position.

Our teams help clients filter through such applications by confirming over written communication, telephone calls and visiting past employers to confirm details. In such processes they find that the employers have laid off said candidate much earlier and have no connections with them for any purpose. With such details coming to light, it is more embarrassing for employees to have to explain their lie and mistakes from their profile and this takes a toll on how they are perceived by the teams that are responsible for hiring them. A lie that is caught tends to have a negative impact on one’s profile even if they were being prioritized in consideration for job roles, because of the falsification of information.

While it is tough to explain why you have been unemployed for a given period of time, it is tougher to explain why you would lie about it. We urge candidates to be thorough with their details and confident in explaining employment gaps with the right information instead of misleading hiring agencies. Apart from time being wasted in going through
interview rounds, many candidates are seen differently once a lie has come to light. We urge you to stay confident, truthful and honest in all information delivery. Prevention is always better than punishment.