When companies cut costs, they often cut Trust & Safety teams whole, not person by person. Entire safety teams have been let go in one morning while hitting every goal they had.
If this just happened to you, start there. It says something about a budget and nothing about you. People in this field understand that better than anyone, because most of them have had a year like this too.
The first two weeks
The sadness and the paperwork arrive together, and only the paperwork has deadlines. Get these done, then rest properly. You've earned it.
- Read your severance terms (the pay and conditions for leaving) twice, and write down the date you have to sign by. Don't sign on day one. The deadline is there so you don't have to.
- Write down when your health insurance actually ends and what it costs to keep it. It's rarely the date you'd guess.
- If you're on a work visa, look up exactly how long you're allowed to stay, counting from your official last day. Do it today. This deadline beats everything else here.
- Line up two or three references now, while everyone still likes you and remembers the details.
- Apply for unemployment benefits if they exist where you live. It isn't a judgment on you. It's a system you paid into.
- Decide whether to announce it, so you aren't just drifting into it. Posting is fine. Not posting is fine. Quiet messages to people work either way.
What to leave behind
Take nothing from work. No example cases, no screenshots, no internal rule documents. In this field that material is more than confidential: it can be dangerous to have, and it has never once improved an interview answer.
What you always get to keep is what's in your head: your judgment, the numbers you remember about your own work, and the story of what you built. That's all any decent interviewer will ask for.
Keeping up while you're out
This field changes with the news, and six months of not following it shows in an interview. Keeping up takes about an hour a week: a few newsletters and podcasts, one online community you actually read, and a job alert so jobs come to you. Writing in public, even a little, does the rest. A short post about a new rule or law is the cheapest way to look like you never left.
Talking about the gap
The whole answer fits in a few lines. Something like: "The company cut its safety team in half in March, and my team went with it. Since then I've followed Europe's new online safety law and written a bit about how users appeal decisions. Now I'm looking for rules work on the kinds of harm I already know."
Say what happened in one line, without bitterness, then go straight to what you did with the time. Nobody in this field needs a layoff explained to them, so the second half is the part they're interested in.
Short-term work, and how long to hold out
Contract work is real work: helping companies write their rules, checking the quality of outsourced review teams, giving safety advice to startups that can't afford a full-time hire. It pays, it keeps you sharp, and some people find they like working this way better.
If you need money and the job is outside the field, take it, and don't feel bad about it. Just keep the hour a week. The field welcomes back people who stayed in touch far more easily than people who vanished.
And when it gets heavy, come back to this: you weren't laid off from the field. You were laid off from a budget. The field is still here, and so are the people in it.
Further reading
- T&S Jobs. Set an alert and let the jobs come to you