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Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and it's good to have you with us. We want to share some news with you. In the early February, our team here at The Takeaway learn from executives at WNYC, that The Takeaway is canceled. We will broadcast our last episode on June 2nd, and along with the end of the show, every member of our team--host, director, producers, engineers, and interns--are being let go without reassignments. Oh, yes, y'all, they gave us the proverbial pink slips. Now, news of the show's cancellation was absolutely shocking for all of us, and we are deeply saddened by it.

The Takeaway first aired in 2008, and this Friday, it's going to be 15 years to the day when The Takeaway launched. During those 15 years, the show has changed a lot. We've welcomed, and bid goodbye to hundreds of fantastic journalists, producers, sonic storytellers. We've had multiple talented hosts and enjoyed the leadership of some terrific radio professionals. Of course, there's you. You invited us into your homes, your offices, your cars. You shared your lives, your ideas, and your talents with us over the years, and we are so grateful for that.

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Of course, we're not alone. In recent weeks, multiple media companies have announced cutbacks and layoffs. Just yesterday, colleagues at ESPN learned they're going to be part of layoffs at their parent company, Walt Disney. On Friday, BuzzFeed announced they're going to shutter their Pulitzer Prize-winning newsroom in its entirety. Also on Friday, Insider announced it was laying off 10% of its staff. In March, NPR, which is not the company that makes The Takeaway but is responsible for so many sister shows on Public Radio, well, NPR cut a hundred people from staff. It canceled four podcasts.

In fact, over the last year, more than a hundred thousand employees in tech and media industries have faced layoffs, including Spotify, Vox Media, Disney's broadcast news division, NBC News, and MSNBC, Google, Meta, Twitter, Amazon. Look, in a lot of ways, our experiences of being laid off are very different from other American workers. Many of us have professional degrees. We've been earning livable wages. Many of us will have continuing health benefits, at least for some period of time, and for those who enjoy strong union advocacy, this means that many of us are going to survive these job losses without facing immediate economic ruin that accompanies losing more contingent low wage jobs.

In other ways, layoffs feel the same for everybody, people. They're utterly destabilizing. They leave you with such profound uncertainty, such a feeling of rejection, and as you toss and turn at night facing this uncertain future, the one question that won't stop coming is, what is next?

Allison Hemming: My name is Allison Hemming, CEO of The Hired Guns, a tech recruiting firm.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, Allison was working at a media company in the tech center when the dot-com bubble burst back in 2000. She tackled the uncertainty with a party, a pink slip party.

Allison Hemming: A pink slip party is an event for individuals who've been laid off, aka pink slipped, who want to come together and commiserate with their colleagues that also were laid off, some folks that were left behind who are still working, and also meet recruiters and career coaches, and anybody else who's out there to support the individuals who are going through this tough time.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We ask Allison if it's time for The Takeaway and our displaced media colleagues to start throwing some pink slip parties of our own.

Allison Hemming: Pink slip parties can come in many shapes and forms. They can be departmental. They can be company-wide. They can be interdisciplinary. Back in the early 2000s, everybody who was working in the tech community and the dot-com community. You had people of all different kinds of job functions coming together across multiple different kinds of companies and then sector specific.

Again, in 2008, after the mortgage meltdown, there were financial services events happening as well for around pink slip parties. There's lots of ways to approach them, but the most important thing is that people who've been laid off have a moment, a real moment to come together, acknowledge what happened, dust themselves off, realize that they don't have to be alone in the world, that they can get together with their colleagues and actually be job hunting buddies with their colleagues and move forward.

It's a really important moment because when you go out there and job hunt, especially for that first time, in that very first job interview, it can be a little bit more than overwhelming to talk about your layoff in that very first interview, and sometimes that very first interview is maybe the best interview for your next job because those initial first interviews that happen are often coming from friends and family and colleagues who want to hook you up and help you out, so being ready out of the gate to be able to talk about what you did for the company and the impact you had without the bitterness or sadness from your layoff is a very important thing, and there's a fundamental shift in how you approach your job hunt.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I like so much of what you've said there. I want to dig into a couple of those pieces for just a moment. One, when you talk about coming together with colleagues in a moment like this, I know it can feel like, "Oh my goodness, you know, if all of these media employees or all of these tech employees are being laid off, aren't we all competitors now rather than colleagues?" I'll say one of the things I'm most proud of when I look at this extraordinary Team Takeaway since we learned that this show was being canceled, is how collaborative folks have been. It does feel to me like it's really easy to devolve away from that and think, "Ooh, I better not tell, person A or person B, because they might now be my competition for this job."

Allison Hemming: That is everybody's first instinct and what I can tell you is at the very beginning, that feels like it might be competitive. However, once you get into the interview process, you may be right or you may be wrong. If you're the wrong fit for the job, it's so easy to turn to a colleague and say, "Jim, Bobby, Sue, I have a great opportunity for you. This is not a fit for me but it could be a fantastic fit for you." Also, if you happen to be working with a recruiter or to the individual hiring manager themselves, you can introduce a colleague to them and say, "Hey, after meeting you in the interview, this role isn't right for me for these two or three reasons, but let me tell you who could be."

The act of actually helping someone is a tremendous confidence builder. What ends up happening is what goes around comes around. If you're putting good karma in the world, what's going to come back around to you? Good karma. [laughs] I am a firm believer that you can't have all the jobs, and there are way more job opportunities than there are available people, so if we're all thinking not only for ourselves but for each other, great things can happen.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I love that. We may be trying to have all the jobs. You cannot have all the jobs. It is a tight labor market even with all of this news.

Allison Hemming: Absolutely. I would say if you think about it, the tech industry is only 2% of all employees, but now technology workers have permeated into every single industry. Much is the case, for media workers and content workers, and so you have branded content teams and new individuals working inside corporations all around the world so it's a moment of thinking, "Okay, my job has been this way for a long time, but who else can use my skillset?"

By the way, that is another great way to lean on your colleagues and/or your fellow pink slippers inside your company or even outside your company through these events or elsewhere, where you can really begin to think about a pathway to maybe a different kind of way to utilize your skills and the playbooks that you've built and earned in your current company. Who better than your colleagues though really to say, "You know what? I think you're great at that I see you do over and over and over again is X, Y, and Z. Let's put that together and write that up, and figure out how you can talk about that in your next job interview."

In many ways, there's so much anxiety around that first job interview or the very first question, so why did you leave your company? Most people aren't ready to hear that in a job interview, but if you practice it and you start to get comfortable at having a good answer for it, then you've got 90% of the interview devoted to talking about the impact you had at the company, and great stories and work experiences that you can bring to your next employer, and that is what is going to get you the job, not hammering and humming through the "Why did you get pink-slipped?" or "Oh, you got laid off, tell me about that." You don't want to spend your whole interview talking about the layoff or your bad boss or the fact that you miss your boss. You have to get through it to get to the other side so you can actually land that job.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I love what you're saying here in part because you're also reflecting this very real human experience of rejection. Those of us who care about our jobs and are trying to do it well, having someone say we don't want you to work here anymore, we're not going to have you working here anymore, can feel like rejection, not just like some kind of budgetary balancing or something.

I know for us at The Takeaway, I have tried really hard to be the main voice being angry in public so that so many of our producers don't have to be, so that folks can be feeling good. Talk a little bit about that. How can you both stand up for yourself relative to a current employer, but also not carry the baggage into all the exciting work that might be in front of you?

Allison Hemming: Well, I think the first thing is pulling back and thinking about how to leverage your legacy. It's really hard in the moment that everybody's in right now. When a layoff has been announced and is yet to come and/or has come, in those first few weeks and months, it's hard, but in retrospect, when you look a year, 5 years, 10 years, 15 years out from this moment, the thing that will carry you is the experiences.

Your relationships with your colleagues and who you will turn to over and over again will get you through it. Trust me. Whether it's a year from now or six months from now, it'll be really easy once you land in your next company to turn around and pull somebody in from the team. What's so fascinating about the dotcom era, and now is if you look at the org charts over time are just teams reconvening and recollaborating with each other over decades now. Sometimes there are new people being brought in, but oftentimes, much like in Hollywood, you've got your Ocean's Eleven crew, and you're bringing it together over and over, and so that's something to look forward to. Maybe there's another hit in the horizon.

Another thing that was really phenomenal that I would say is something that's been overlooked in the dotcom meltdown to where we are now is the amount of new companies that got created out of that moment. People did go away. They were bummed. It is real. You have to own that moment, but then they got together with their people. They started to build new things. Sometimes they had a rough time finding a new job, so they went and created their new job or they consulted.

Then very quickly, I could tell you between 2000-2005, by 2005, companies they were rehiring any consultants that they brought in and putting them into full-time roles. The amount of open roles had shifted over time and was growing quite steadily. All of that scaffolding and really grit that got built up in the post-dotcom era really served, I think, the tech and media industry for the next, and it's still serving us today, I would say.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. We're taking a break here, but stick with us. We've got more pink slip partying when we return. It's The Takeaway.

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You're back with The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. We've been talking about recent media and tech layoffs, including our own here for Team Takeaway. All of us are laid off as of June 2nd, when The Takeaway will air its last episode. Right now, we're with Allison Hemming, CEO of The Hired Guns, a tech recruiting agency. Now Allison is the brain behind pink slip parties, which are networking events that she started to help her and fellow laid-off employees find new jobs when the dotcom bubble burst back in 2000. We've talked a lot about the employee. Do you have advice for employers?

Allison Hemming: I am so happy you asked me this. Yes, I have important advice. Now I'm going to speak to them broadly in the ether, which is your talent, your brand, the people that you've brought together to create this thing that is your company and your culture. Everybody wants the company to survive. People do recognize that cutbacks happen and that sometimes times get tough and layoffs are necessary. It's how you go about the layoffs that will stick with your legacy.

There's a number of companies that have been really enjoying playing the tough guy over the last couple of months, particularly out of tech, and then we had a big new one with the pity city buzz that happened last week with MillerKnoll, where the CEO when asked about whether or not people get their bonuses because they had to hit their numbers, she asked the staff to stay out of pity city.

People are people. They want to be spoken to with transparency and honesty. If they can help get you through the other side, they will. When you're doing a layoff, it's not just about the people that are having the laugh who you need to caretake for on one hand. On the other side, it's all the people that are left behind and how you treat your people on their way out the door every single person inside your company who's left is watching.

Something that I caution executives against is you do not want to be a cicada company where after your layoff you have nothing left but a shell of your former company, and there is no culture left. You have to caretake for that every single second. A company playbook to follow is Atlassian, who did have a 5% layoff back in March. How they went about it was pretty amazing. That's the company that operates Trello, but they were very forthright. They let their workers come together before they left. There was no, "Hey, in the cover of darkness, returning off your email. You didn't know this was coming, and we're going to pretend like we never worked together." That didn't happen. They were honest, truthful, empathetic. I think every CEO has an ability to do that, but it requires planning.

If you expect that your company is going to make it beyond the tough time that they're in, you want your brand to last. Another interesting thing that happened after the dotcom meltdown was that a lot of companies were able to re-recruit people because they had good experiences. Not all companies were bad when they were doing their layoffs, and people were happy to go back, and I think that's a really important thing. If you think that your brand's in it for the long haul, and you as a CEO are in it for the long haul with your company, treat everybody all the time.

I'm so passionate about, I really can't help myself because it's so easy to be good, it's so easy to be transparent. People see the writing on the wall. Workers are not dumb. We just went through the entirety of the pandemic, and now we're all getting walloped with this moment. In the pandemic, people went out of their way to be kind to each other. We know how to do it. We saw how to do it. We just have to keep doing it.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I love this image of the cicada company, of being just the empty shell that is love perhaps because as a Southerner, we get the cicadas through, and there are times when they're just like littering the yard. I worry also about being the cicada employee, like so emptied out, so hollowed out from an experience of layoff that you don't have enough to bring. Are there practices, procedures, amount of time, candles to light, chants to say in that time between the layoff and the next gig to hold on to some of that hope, that enthusiasm about yourself and your own accomplishments, and your team and what you've done, what you've contributed before you're in the space you're actually looking back on it?

Allison Hemming: Everybody's circumstances are different. Let's take the person who has the ability to take a moment and maybe their company was good and they gave them a long enough severance. It is good to take that moment, absolutely, and really ponder and contemplate what you want to do next. Often, when we're grinding away at the office, we don't have the ability to think introspectively enough about what we want and what we need. Going back to pre-pandemic, everybody's been on this hamster wheel.

I would say if you have the luxury of being able to take the time, do it. What I can tell you is, again, with all the people I've worked with over the last 23 years in recruiting, the people who do take the time, never say, "Ah, I wish I'd gotten right back into the grind." They never say that. They say, "I'm so helpful. I actually thought about what I wanted. I built a path. I had a strategy. I was self-directed about it, and I went and got it." The amazing thing that happens is they made it happen.

On the other hand, if you have to get going right away, I would say the most important thing you can do, even if it's only a weekend, is to pull back and ask yourself, "What do I really want to do next? What do I want to bring into my interviews, and what do I want to leave behind?" I say this so emphatically, because, again, back to you may be lucky enough to get your best interview first. That's something we talk a lot about is, in New York City there are no dress rehearsals. I think in the environment we're in right now, that is true too.

I definitely recommend journaling. I definitely recommend writing out in advance what happened. Why do you think you are no longer with the company? Sometimes, it's a department, sometimes it's a show, sometimes it's a whole thing, and it's business. That's an easy thing to do as an answer, but getting through really quickly what and how you were impacted, and then moving through back to the impact is probably the best tip I can give for anybody who has to look for a job right away. You have to be able to answer that simply.

If you have a little bit of more time, then you might be able to contemplate. Its now time for a career change? Where should I go and how do I change all of my assets to reflect directionally where I want to go next? How can I talk about my work through the next lens of, if you're doing an industry shift, you have to learn new vocabulary and translate that? That does take a moment, having that strategy.

If you do need to find a job right away, I very much caution you to not shoot for a career change at the exact same time. It is much easier to go and look for a job that's really similar to you, even if it's in another industry, than to change your job function or discipline in this moment. A lot of times after a layoff, people want something new. They want fresh start. They want all of these things, but that's in dichotomy with having to bring home the bacon. Think of that then as a two-step process. I'm going to jump onto a lily pad for a safe landing. I'm going to do the same kind of thing with a very similar company. I'm going to catch my breath, but I am not going to stop. I'm going to keep working directionally on where I want to go in my career. That navigation component can take a year or two.

I'm not suggesting job hopping after this because sometimes that safe landing feels really good but committing yourself to understanding that navigation can offer a hopeful and holistic approach. Many companies have been in the foxhole with each other through this whole pandemic. Like, "We know each other. We really do." I think if I was to offer one key thing at the end of this interview, is invest time, break your teams up into job-hunting buddies. Two people can have similar jobs, two people can have very different jobs but commit yourself to being honest with each other and doing things like-- One thing that's super key that sometimes people don't think about is how will I be on that first Zoom interview.

We've all been on Zoom for the last three years, but what people forget is a job interview is very different than a Zoom team meeting. We could have great team meeting game, but what you don't want to do is have the tell me about yourself question last an entirety of the 30-minute Zoom interview. You need to be at the ready. It can be fun. It doesn't have to all be terrible, I guess. Your relationships will further develop, and take the concept of the pink slip party. You can do it for your team meeting once a quarter or once a month at a happy hour, where you could see each other and see how everybody's doing. If you're all in the same city or on a Zoom call, if that's better because now everybody's all over the place, that's okay too.

It's that consistency in having that appointment setting and creating the commitment to each other that can really get you through the moment that seems super scary. What I can tell you is having now worked with thousands of people over the years, and so many at the start of my company when I started The Hired Guns and the pink slip parties at the same time, so many of those people have gone on to do amazing things and worked with each other again. That familial atmosphere, that doesn't go away unless you let it.

That's the part that's on all of us individually as we push through this awkward moment that we're in, but there'll be another good time. The economy is still hiring. Being creative and being agile, thinking about where and how we could be useful, and be excited to approach work in new and different ways, that's part of the journey. I think opening yourselves up to that opportunity could be really amazing.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Allison Hemming, I feel like you just came and made some lemonades with our lemons [laughs]. Allison Hemming is the CEO of The Hired Guns, a tech recruiting agency. I think she might also literally be The Takeaway personal cheerleader right now. We so appreciate you spending some time with us, Allison.

Allison Hemming: Well, Melissa, thank you.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: I've got just one more note here from Team Takeaway to all of you. We're going away after 15 years, but here's what we want you to know. When format or time slots or even hosts changed here, what remained at the center of The Takeaway is you. You're the reason we get up early, that we stay up late, and that we work to get it right every day. During our final weeks on air, you remain at the center of the work of Team Takeaway. With only a few weeks left, we hope that you're going to take the time to reach out.

Is there a favorite story or episode that you want to hear again? Is there a person you'd like to hear from on The Takeaway? Is there a topic or an issue or a concern that you want to hear covered in our final days? If so, call us at 877-869-8253. That's 8778-MY-TAKE, or just make us a little voice memo and send it to takeawaycallers@gmail.com. We're going to keep checking back in with you between now and June 2nd as we enter the final take of The Takeaway.

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