At this point, it’s become so common it’s a social media cliché: the post-layoff note on LinkedIn. Overly polite and awkwardly upbeat, the freshly unemployed thank their ex-employer for a great few years and highlight all the great things they did there. I’m looking forward to the next challenge, they write, adding the #opentowork hashtag. Please reach out if your company is hiring. Every time a big company makes a round of cuts, I see a few of these pop up in my feed.
But last week, when Meta culled some 4,000 workers, I expected total silence. Mark Zuckerberg had announced that the cuts were designed to get rid of “low performers,” burdening the departing employees with the professional equivalent of a scarlet letter. I felt terrible for them. No one, I thought, would want to call attention to the fact that they’d been branded as below average.
Boy, was I wrong.
Within a day, laid-off Meta employees were taking to LinkedIn — not just to announce they were looking for work, but to fight back against Zuckerberg’s assessment of their work. It was a new iteration of the classic #opentowork post, ditching the deference for a tone of defiance.
“I am not a low performer,” a content manager wrote. “I am an adaptive hard worker who thrives in work that I can be passionate about.” A product designer asserted: “That label is misleading, and for many of us, it’s flat-out wrong.” A lawyer — deriding what she called “Zuck’s newfound ‘masculine energy'” — offered to provide the receipts: “I’m not a ‘low performer.’ I’ve got the reviews to prove it, and countless colleagues and managers will vouch for me!” A data scientist even uploaded screenshots of his glowing performance reviews, which indicated he routinely “exceeded expectations” and “greatly exceeded expectations.”
This is something we haven’t seen before in the professional world: Employees sticking up for themselves in public, and calling out their former employer for misrepresenting their work. When LinkedIn introduced the #opentowork feature during the early days of the pandemic, it was a tall order to get people to announce that they’d been laid off. In the past, people usually kept their dismissal private, fearing the stigma would prevent them from getting another job.
That began to change in late 2022, when a huge round of layoffs hit the tech sector. Suddenly, tens of thousands of coders, product managers, and marketers found themselves out of a job all at once. Some of their CEOs went out of their way to apologize for overhiring, and to praise their axed staffers as great employees. That encouraged people to use the #opentowork banner to announce that they’d been laid off. Last summer, when I spoke with corporate recruiters about the trend, most told me it no longer gave them pause to see that a candidate had been laid off. They’d come to understand that it doesn’t automatically cast doubt on someone’s performance.
Now, Meta’s employees are taking that realization to the next level. The groundswell of defiance started last year, when a handful of people posted videos of themselves on TikTok as they received the news of their layoffs. The most viral was Brittany Pietsch, a Cloudflare employee who kept asking the HR person for evidence of her supposed low performance. The videos were uncomfortable, but I found it refreshing to watch these young people tell their side of the story. Similarly, the new crop of #opentowork posts is enabling Meta’s employees to assert their value in the marketplace — using social media, the very thing Zuckerberg helped supercharge, to counter the narrative he’s telling about the layoffs. “While we can’t do anything about being laid off,” a Meta research manager posted on LinkedIn, “we aren’t without any agency.”
The question is: Will standing up to your former boss hurt your chances of landing a new job? The standard advice for laid-off workers is to avoid saying anything negative about their former employers, both on social media and in job interviews. Ashley Herd, a former head of HR who founded a firm that provides training for managers, acknowledges that speaking up might turn off some potential employers. But getting rejected by them, she adds, might not be a bad thing.
“Good employers are looking for people who are good communicators — who can advocate for themselves just like they would in their role for the organization,” Herd says. “Those that speak up might realistically find themselves with a smaller pool of potential employers, but that will be a group that actually aligns with their values and supports long-term career success and happiness.”
Sandra Sucher, a professor at Harvard Business School who studies layoffs, agrees that it’s good for employees to stick up for themselves. “I don’t think it’s a mistake,” she tells me. “As soon as you’ve got the CEO of my company saying, ‘I’m laying off people because they’re no good at their job,’ reasonable people are going to say, ‘Do I accept that or do I try to change the narrative here?'”
If that’s their goal, Meta’s employees seem to be succeeding. People have begun to question the “low performer” label that Zuckerberg has been throwing around. When those who were laid off start sending out their résumés, recruiters will likely have heard that the purge included a lot of employees with excellent performance reviews. Besides, the defiant posts are proving to be a good way to kick off a job search: Many of the comments on LinkedIn are filled with warm endorsements from ex-colleagues and networking offers from total strangers. This, ironically, was always the power of social media, as Zuckerberg championed it — the promise of “connecting people” and “building community.” When it comes to making good on the company’s slogans, Meta’s former employees have proven themselves to be high performers.
Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.
