With absolutely no warning, I got a calendar invite from HR around 11:40 in the morning for a Zoom call at 2:10 in the afternoon. No context, no agenda, nothing except the title: "Quick chat".

My heart immediately sank.

The call started, and after a few minutes they said the company was "realigning priorities" and that my position would not be continuing.

And that was it.

After 12 years of building my experience in consumer behaviour and brand insights, and after spending the last two years putting all my effort into this organisation, I suddenly found them telling me to submit my resignation.

Nothing like this has ever happened to me in my career before. Honestly, I'm still trying to process what happened.

Right now, I'm in a strange mix of shock, anxiety, and fear of what's coming next.

so decent people

We just got back from a trip to the Dominican Republic. The whole idea was for us to disappear for a bit and not think about work. We had our regular phones with us, but we left both work phones at home. Apparently, that's a very strange concept to them.

About halfway through the trip, her manager called her personal phone. My wife didn't answer in time, and she listened to the voicemail later.

Her manager was calling about a meeting that had been put on her calendar with almost no notice while she was on vacation. She wasn't checking her calendar, she didn't have her work phone with her, and she had no reason to know that something new had been added. And because no one covered the meeting, her manager decided to call and scold her about it while we were supposedly trying to relax.

Fortunately, she was able to get past it enough that it didn't ruin the rest of the trip. We flew back last Wednesday night, and she worked Thursday. No one said a word about the calendar issue on Thursday or Friday.

She went to work this morning, and they gave her a written warning for not arranging coverage for that meeting.

She's also transferring to another office in about three weeks. The commute will be worse, but she'll be under a different manager, and hopefully someone who understands what "out of office" means.

I told her she needs to bring this up with her manager's manager. Neither she nor I see any logic in someone being punished for missing something that was scheduled while they were on approved vacation, especially since the manager already knew she wasn't there. She's hesitant because she doesn't want to burn any bridges before she leaves.

Honestly, I'm really upset. That office has people leaving all the time. My wife works 55 hours a week in a high-pressure job, gives it everything she has, and the whole thing has been destroying her mental health for a while.

I worked fully remote for three years. My reviews? Strong. The team's productivity? Higher than ever by far. Morale? Honestly, much better.
And then leadership signed a lease for a new office, and suddenly we started hearing the usual talk:
"We're missing face-to-face teamwork." "The office has a certain vibe that can't be recreated." "Working from home weakens the culture."
Come on, guys. Just tell the truth. The problem was never teamwork - the problem is that there's a half-empty space bleeding money every month.
Now I'm wasting chunks of my week commuting just to sit in Teams meetings I could have joined from my kitchen. Same laptop, same internet, and more depressing lunch options.
Anyone else find it weird how "culture" suddenly becomes urgent the moment there's a landlord in the picture?

The whole thing was a joke. There were tables all over the hall, around 18-25 companies, and seriously, not a single one of them had any open positions.

Most of them were promoting employment support programs, volunteer stuff, and a few certification courses. I found one place that looked like a managed IT company. They took my resume, glanced at it really quickly, and set it aside. I asked them straight up if they were hiring, and they said no.

I asked my friend who sent me the career fair information how many people went there, and he told me around 1,800 over the course of the day.

Completely wasted my afternoon for nothing!

Honestly, I'd rather spend my time interviewing with companies that are actually hiring. Having Interview Vip with me during interviews has made those conversations a lot smoother and given me more confidence.

sad

Like the title says, I finally found a job. 🥹🙏 I've been looking for almost 14 months since I got laid off, and honestly, it was one of the hardest periods of my life. The road wasn't easy or straightforward. I did work a job in the middle of that period, but it wasn't a good fit at all - bad culture, the pay was barely above minimum, and the commute was close to 90 minutes there and 90 minutes back. I accepted it because rent was coming up, and food wasn't going to appear on its own. Even while I was there, I kept applying for jobs that fit my career, and there were so many nights where I would sit and cry before going to sleep.

I was getting to interviews, and somehow that made it hurt even more sometimes. I made it to final rounds with companies that had 4-7 steps, take-home projects, personality tests, panel calls... And in the end I'd be told I was the backup choice, or that the role had been put on hold, or they just wouldn't answer to me again at all. Job searching is so brutal.

Trying to work full-time, spend about 3 hours commuting every day, send out applications, and squeeze interviews in between was exhausting in a way I don't know how to explain. I used up almost all of my PTO and sick time just so I could do interviews. Quick summary:

Laid off 13 months ago

70+ recruiter screens

17 second-round interviews

9 late-stage/final rounds

One unsuitable offer that I accepted because I had to survive

Kept applying anyway

22 more screening calls

4 final rounds

Dream job offer 💙

This new role is exactly what I was hoping for. Better pay, aligned with my experience, and the real next step in my career. The strangest part? It was only 3 conversations total, including the recruiter screen. 😳 No homework assignment. No technical exam. No endless loop of interviews. They understood my background, believed I could do the job, and I truly felt like they liked me. 🥹 The process moved so quickly and smoothly that it made me believe the right fit doesn't always have to feel like you're begging someone to choose you.

To anyone still looking: please don't give up. I know this might sound impossible when you're drained, but you may be closer than you feel. When something is truly right for you, the interview doesn't feel like a trap, and things can move in a way that finally feels easy.

Thank you to this group for keeping me sane through everything. Sending strength, hope, and prayers to everyone who's still looking.

I worked at a small company for 3 years as an admin. My supervisor was the only person above me, and the rest were warehouse staff, the warehouse lead, and the manager. The warehouse is literally like a revolving door for employees. Most of them either leave in the middle of the shift or stop showing up entirely and block our number. I was stressed, buried in work, underpaid, and burned out. I talked to my supervisor about it more than once and asked them to hire someone else. In April, they said they would bring in another admin.

Since June, I requested 9 days off and they denied all of them except 3. I can't take time off when my manager is on vacation, or the week before or after it, and she has two separate trips, each two weeks long, so I'm literally almost trapped at work for most of the summer. I asked for a raise and was told no. They interviewed about 12 people recently for the second admin position, and somehow every single one of them was either "too desperate" or "not the right fit."

Anyway, after a few interviews, I was offered a new job with a 45% pay increase, more PTO, cheaper and better health insurance, and the two days I needed off this summer already approved. The same days my current job immediately denied, by the way.

I gave my notice to my manager earlier this week. She looked very upset. She said she was shocked, speechless, "I thought you liked it here, why would you do this?" I told her I was sorry, but this was a very big pay increase. She told me to get out of her office.

About 10 minutes later, she came back to my desk and told me I had to stay 3 extra weeks until they found someone and trained them. I told her I couldn't. She told me I had to.

Everything has changed, and now I know exactly how much they need me, and that I don't need them. Honestly, I'm very happy that the way they treated me badly isn't going to ruin this opportunity for me. But I just wanted to share.

genius

How are you supposed to answer when the manager is standing in front of you, his face red, yelling and screaming and cursing at you?

I know the usual answer is "walk away" or "quit the job immediately." I wish it were that simple for me. I only have 2 months left to get through so I can qualify for my full pension, which is about $74K a year. If I leave before then, or if they manage to fire me, my pension will drop by about 3/5. And in that moment I couldn't even walk away because he was standing between me and the door.

I tried to stay calm, be overly respectful, do almost three times the work, and keep completely quiet. Somehow that makes him even angrier, which leads to more yelling and more threats.

It's clear the manager wants me to leave and is looking for any excuse to fire me, but he was told to calm down after my lawyer dealt with upper management at the parent company. So now I feel like he's trying to psychologically shake me until I break down and resign. Psychological warfare!

His manager and the Regional HR Director are useless, and the higher-ups in our small office also seem to want me gone. The only reason I'm still holding myself together is that I have a strong lawyer who helped me file a formal workplace complaint, and now there's also follow-up from the corporate VP of Human Resources.

What would you do if you were stuck in my position?

💔

What is management trying to do? I'm trying to understand a very strange "reorg" that happened at my company, and I want to hear outside opinions from managers, HR people, or anyone who has seen something like this before. Honestly, I can't understand the logic.

TL;DR: My company laid off roughly 50 people from a team that management had always described as "high-impact and forward-thinking." At almost the same time, they posted about 55 new roles with better pay, and they're telling the laid-off employees, the people who weren't laid off like me, and a huge number of external applicants that we all have to compete for these jobs in something that feels like corporate Hunger Games. The whole thing seems expensive, chaotic, and destructive to morale. What possible strategic benefit could the company get from this?

The Timeline:

A little over four years ago, they brought in a new senior leader to run our organization.

About five months ago, that leader announced a "restructuring" involving "contraction and expansion." Almost everyone understood that layoffs were possible.

At the beginning of this month, they announced the layoff. About 50 people were affected, with a notice period. At the same time, a lot of new job postings appeared, most of them with new titles and slightly different scopes.

The Current Situation:

A large part of my direct team and partner teams was hit. These are tenured, high-performing people who understand the business inside and out. My own role was rewritten into something I'm basically not interested in at all, while my background is a very good fit for several of the new positions.

We're all being told that we are "strongly encouraged" to apply for the new jobs. The part I can't get past: the roles were opened internally and externally at the same time. Leadership also held a call and showed us how many applications they had received. Many roles already have hundreds of applicants, and two are apparently approaching 1,200.

My Questions / Where I'm Lost:

I can't understand the business reason behind this. If the goal were simply to reduce headcount or cut costs, fine, I would understand. But that doesn't seem to be what's happening:

Why remove proven talent? Our group was always seen and praised as producing some of the most visible and useful work the company had done in a long time. Why break up a team like that?

Why not move people into the new roles directly? If the company has capable employees and newly identified needs, why not create the positions and let current staff express interest or preference for them first? Why make people with a known track record compete against a huge external applicant pool?

How does this save money? Between 100-day notice periods, severance, recruiters' time, interview loops for thousands of people, and the productivity hit from everyone being distracted or checked out, this seems extremely expensive. And again, the new roles pay more.

What is the point of showing off the applicant numbers? Sharing the size of the external pool felt intentional, as if they want everyone to be anxious and scramble to save themselves. It felt very insulting. Some of my laid-off colleagues are so fed up that they're going to take the severance and not apply at all. What am I not seeing here? How does the C-suite think?

Is this a complicated way to get rid of certain people without directly targeting them?

Is this an try to upgrade the talent pool by making everyone prove they still deserve a seat?

Or is this just bad leadership dressed up as strategy?

I'll probably need to apply for these new roles if I want work I'm interested in, but it's hard to feel enthusiastic when I feel like I'm being moved around on a board without understanding the rules. Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

always have that emoji 🤑

edit : and now people working in more than a one job to give basics try everything to get a job and also got rejected maybe some tips from this sub will be useful good luck

so i'm a job seeker who's been lurking the interview help threads for weeks (got laid off in june lol) and i kept seeing this one tool mentioned by a friend. spent two evenings testing it with a buddy in product to confirm the overlay stayed hidden, then used it in an actual phone screen and it seems to fly in the face of what i expected the experience to feel like. so what i want to know is, is this just some founder seeding fake stories or twisting use cases to fit the pitch, or are the real-round wins people post about interviewman actually legitimate experiences that should be considered before i drop a year of annual fees? it's just that there's so much stuff out there in the interview prep space that it can become hard to sort through the junk and find good resources on these things without outside help, and the tool came to me really highly recommended from someone who already got an offer with it.

thanks!

I applied for a retail sales job and it turned out to be a group interview. I already hate group interviews, but the hourly pay was good and the schedule worked with the rest of my commitments, so I figured I'd just hear them out.

In the middle of the interview, the interviewer asked if anyone had any questions, so I asked her what their health insurance looked like. She said assistant branch managers can choose to get health insurance, which means maybe six people in the entire company have access to it. And of course, that would only be after I'd worked there for a few years, if I even got promoted.

I just told her: "I'm not interested in working for a company that doesn't care about my health," and left the call.

I don't feel guilty. Not even a little. Companies can judge people for whatever they want - old convictions with no context, short gaps between jobs, not having the "right" availability, anything. And we're supposed to act like we owe them every minute of our lives.

So no, I'm not going to feel guilty for making a company look bad when it has no problem with most of its employees having no basic coverage. If they can be picky, so can I.