Dan Springer, the former CEO of electronic signature company DocuSign, told Business Insider that there are two things people can do to lower their risks of being laid off — one big-picture and one smaller.
“The macro piece is, you need to invest in your capabilities, and as new technologies come along, you have to embrace them,” Springer said.
Springer referenced the rise of Apple’s iPhone, which launched in 2007 and displaced incumbent players like Blackberry.
“When the iPhone came out and mobility became part of business, there were some people who said, ‘I’m just staying with my Blackberry. I’m using it for emails, and I don’t care about apps.’ Five years later, they’re a dinosaur,” he added.
Springer said the micro factor relates to how invested people are in their companies’ work. He said that people who want to be the “most employable” need to be “really committed to the company and constantly just apply yourself to make your company successful.”
“Companies aren’t perfect, but for the most part, companies figure out who the best employees are. They want employees that are culture builders, the ones that are working hard to serve our customers, doing all the right things,” Springer said.
“If you really apply yourself and don’t become cynical about that, then I think you become really valuable to the company, and you’re always going to be needed,” he added.
The Harvard Business School graduate was DocuSign’s CEO from 2017 to 2022 and left the company’s board in April. The company’s stock soared in the pandemic, but cratered about 80% from its summer 2021 peak to Springer’s departure a year later.
Springer joined Ironclad, a Franklin Templeton-backed contract management software company, as CEO in April.
Springer’s tenure as DocuSign CEO coincided with the rapid expansion of the company’s workforce. The company went from 2,255 employees in January 2018 to 7,461 employees in January 2022.
After Springer stepped down as CEO in June 2022, DocuSign underwent three rounds of layoffs.
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The first round took place in September 2022, when DocuSign said it was laying off nearly 700 employees, or 9% of its workforce.
Months later, in February 2023, DocuSign said it was laying off about 700 employees, or 10% of its workforce.
Its last round of layoffs took place in February 2024, when DocuSign laid off 440 workers, or 6% of its employees. The company said in an SEC filing that it had 6,838 employees as of January 31, 2025.
Mass layoffs have gripped the tech industry in recent years. In July, Microsoft said it was laying off around 9,000 employees, or about 4% of its total workforce. The company previously announced layoffs affecting around 6,000 workers in May.
In 2023, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg embarked on what he called a “year of efficiency.” Zuckerberg said in March 2023 that he was axing 10,000 employees, just months after the social media giant had laid off 11,000 employees in November 2022.
That’s on top of the threat posed by AI, which some business leaders say could result in fewer jobs. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a May interview with Axios that AI could eliminate 50% of entry-level office jobs in the next five years.
In September, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told reporters that AI was probably having an effect on the job market, though it is “hard to say how big it is.”
“It may be that companies or other institutions that have been hiring younger people right out of college are able to use AI more than they had in the past,” Powell said.
“That may be part of the story. It’s also part of the story, though, that job creation more broadly has slowed down,” he added.
