Former Microsoft Employee Shares How Landed Job at Meta After Layoff

In May, after 14 years at Microsoft, Deborah Hendersen began to sense her time at the tech giant might be running out.

Several colleagues on partner teams were among the roughly 6,000 employees laid off that month. The news made Hendersen, a user researcher in the company’s Xbox division, worry that her group would be next. She said it eventually became the “worst-kept secret” that additional layoffs were coming, and that her team was likely to be affected. All she could do was hope to come out unscathed.

“It wasn’t so much like watching a car wreck,” said the 45-year-old, who lives in Seattle. “It was more like you were in the car, knowing it was going to wreck.”

On July 2, her fears were confirmed. Hendersen was one of about 9,000 employees laid off as part of a sweeping companywide reduction.

During previous rounds of layoffs she’d survived, Hendersen said it was often hard to tell who had been let go — something the company attributed to privacy concerns. But in her view, that lack of clarity made the experience more difficult for those still at the company, who were left guessing which colleagues had suddenly disappeared.

“It’s just very uncomfortable, in my experience, to not know who has been affected,” she said.

So rather than keeping her layoff a secret, she decided to make sure her network knew about it. The moment she received a mysterious meeting invite that she suspected would bring bad news, she started drafting messages to share internally and on LinkedIn. That decision didn’t just bring emotional support — it also helped her land a new role at Meta two months later.

Hendersen is among the thousands of Microsoft employees who’ve been laid off over the past year. A Microsoft spokesperson previously told Business Insider the company was focused on reducing management layers and streamlining processes. However, the cuts have also affected individual contributors, such as Hendersen.

Microsoft isn’t alone. Google, Amazon, and Intel have also announced plans to shed workers. While layoffs remain low by historical standards, tech workers have been disproportionately affected, and a slowdown in white-collar hiring has made it harder for many to secure new roles.

But in this challenging environment, some job seekers have found ways to break through. Hendersen shared how she responded to the layoff — and how she landed a job at Meta without ever applying.

Forming a community to help each other move on

Hendersen’s journey to a new role began less than an hour after she learned she’d been laid off, when she posted on LinkedIn to share the news. Next, while she still had access to her email, she messaged colleagues on her team, letting them know she’d lost her job — and hoping to identify others affected.

As people replied, she added them to a Microsoft Teams group chat. Over the next week, the group of more than a dozen people became a support hub — where laid-off employees traded tips on how to file for unemployment and make sense of the HR materials they’d received.

“I would vastly have preferred that I’d have been the only person who was laid off,” Hendersen said. “But the fact that we could immediately build community was just incredibly helpful.”

Hendersen also took steps to prepare financially. When she first suspected a layoff might be coming, she and her husband sold some of their stock holdings to ensure they had enough cash on hand. They didn’t know exactly what the severance package would look like, so they wanted to be ready.

Once the layoff hit, Hendersen learned she’d continue receiving paychecks through late August, followed by a lump-sum severance payment based on her years of service. With that information, she and her husband analyzed their budget, determined how far their savings would take them, and identified expenses they could cut. She said the process was stressful.

“There was very much a sense of stunning anxiety,” she said.

Finding a job without applying for one

By reaching out to colleagues and preparing financially, Hendersen hoped to make the transition from Microsoft a little smoother. But she wanted to take some time to decompress and get organized before beginning her job search.

“It had been 15 years since I’d updated my résumé in any meaningful way,” she said. “I didn’t have standardized cover letters. I didn’t have all the little stories prepared that you’re supposed to tell about yourself in interviews.”

However, Hendersen said she didn’t decompress quite as much as she’d intended. After posting on LinkedIn, friends and former colleagues began reaching out about job opportunities, leading to informal conversations about whether they could be a good fit for her.

“It was just like this ocean of warm hugs and kindness that came from people who were here to help me,” she said.

Support also came from the other laid-off Microsoft colleagues she’d organized in a Teams chat. Before losing access to their internal chat, the group transitioned to Discord, where they shared job opportunities, helped each other prepare for interviews, vented their frustrations, and celebrated their successes.

Since Hendersen was finding opportunities through her network, she generally avoided the traditional application route. In total, she thinks she may have formally applied to one role. Relying on her network felt more manageable, especially since, after more than a decade out of the job market, she wasn’t sure how to navigate online job searching.

Typically, she would share her résumé with a connection, who would then refer her for a role. A recruiter would follow up to begin the process. In some cases, someone would flag an opening, and she’d message the recruiter directly, rather than applying online.

One of the roles that was recommended to her was a user experience researcher position at Meta. Someone she knew at the company told her about the opening, which was similar to her role at Microsoft, where she’d conducted studies to evaluate how players interacted with games in development. The Meta role was under Reality Labs, the company’s hardware and virtual reality division, and allowed her to work from Meta’s Seattle office.

Hendersen said the position seemed like a good fit, and after her connection referred her, she landed an interview. In late August, she received a job offer and started full-time in October.

How to respond to a layoff

Hendersen said she came away from her job search with a few takeaways. First, it’s important to develop a library of stories from your career that you can use in interviews.

“You’ve done amazing things that people should be really impressed by,” she said. “But can you remember them in the moment? That’s so hard.”

She also recommends practicing how to tell those stories, especially to people who aren’t in your field. When she interviewed at Meta, not everyone she spoke with came from the gaming world. That meant she had to explain her past work in a way that resonated with interviewers who didn’t have the same level of expertise.

Perhaps her biggest takeaway was the importance of supporting — and being supported by — others going through the same journey.

“It’s so helpful to have the support of other people who are going through it — both the highs and the lows,” she said. “Because everybody gets turned down, gets their hopes up, and is just figuring out how to remain sane in a really challenging time.”