Layoffs, Silence, and Spin: Why Employer Branding Must Acknowledge Pain

Employer branding did not simply struggle in the layoff cycle of the last few years, it mostly vanished when things got hard. Many teams defaulted to silence, euphemism, or aggressive positivity while jobs were being cut in the background. That disconnect has turned layoff behaviour into a live test of whether any employer promise is worth believing. 

If you're like me, you might have noticed...

• When layoffs hit, the glossy employer brand often goes missing, replaced by legal boilerplate and cryptic “strategic realignment” notes. 
• “We are still a great place to work” messaging during or right after job cuts lands somewhere between denial and gaslighting. 
• Survivors and alumni now talk publicly, from internal screenshots to LinkedIn posts, so silence rarely protects the brand for long. 
• Candidates increasingly treat how a company handles exits as a proxy for how it handles everything else. 
• In 2026, the credibility test is shifting from “how do you attract talent” to “how do you let people go”. 

SPONSORED by Fathom

Momentum isn’t always progress, especially when you always end up back where you started.

Fathom helps you escape the loop. With insight, not intuition.

Break the Loop

Hook and context: if layoffs are normal, what exactly are you branding? 

Scroll any social feed during a round of tech or corporate layoffs and you often see two parallel realities. 

In one, a company page is still posting award badges, purpose slogans, and photos of social gatherings. In the other, employees announce “impacted by the restructuring” and share stories of finding out by calendar invite, system lockout, or a group video call that cut hundreds at once. 

In theory, this is the moment employer branding should matter most. The stories workers tell about that day will shape how others see the company for years to come. In practice, many employer brand teams go quiet the minute things get messy, or they keep playing the same upbeat track while everyone else can hear the fire alarm. 

If layoffs are now a recurring part of corporate life rather than a rare emergency, employer branding cannot be a sunshine only department. Whoever has the final say needs to decide whether their employer brand is in the business of marketing, or in the business of telling organisational truths. 

The empathy gap: where employer branding language collapses under stress 

The core problem is not that companies communicate badly during layoffs, although many do. It's that the language of employer branding is often built for the good times only. 

Normal EB copy leans on belonging, growth, purpose, “we are like a family”. Then the layoff memo arrives and uses phrases like “rightsizing”, “workforce optimisation”, or “those impacted”. The tone shifts from “you matter” to “you are a cost line” in about three paragraphs.  

People aren’t stupid, they notice that gap. Survivors see their colleagues disappear overnight while leadership insists the culture is stronger than ever. Alumni are thanked “for their contributions” in one sentence, then told not to access systems in the next. 

The empathy gap shows up in three ways: 

• Abstract language for real loss. Jobs vanish but communications talk about “strategic priorities”, “macroeconomic headwinds”, or “focus”. It sounds like a weather report while individuals are recalculating rent. 
• Universal blame, selective responsibility. There is lots of “we did not make these decisions lightly”, but little plain acknowledgement that leadership made a choice and that choice has human costs. 
• No space for emotion. People are told to be “professional” while they are losing pay, identity, and community. The message effectively says: your feelings are a risk to the brand. 

Employer branding teams are often kept far away from this, or asked to “keep things positive”. The result is a split screen: internal pain on one side, external motivational posts on the other – and this is where many brands haemorrhage trust.  

SPONSORED

Helping HR, talent acquisition, employer branding, and company culture professionals find careers worth smiling about.

Find People-First Jobs Now

If layoffs are the new norm, what is employer branding for? 

If a company expects to run layoffs every few years, then its employer brand is not just a promise about joining. It is a promise about the full life cycle, including leaving. 

That raises uncomfortable questions. Many current employer brand narratives cannot survive contact with routine layoffs: 

• “We are a family.” Families do not typically send calendar invites with “15 minutes” and an HR witness. If the company behaves like a portfolio, it should not market itself like a family. 
• “People are our greatest asset.” Assets are protected. If headcount is treated as the easiest lever to pull, the phrase loses all seriousness.  
• “We invest in long term careers.” Long term cannot mean “until the next earnings call”. If volatility is part of the model, so is honest disclosure about that volatility. 

If layoffs are normal, employer branding has to grow up. It cannot only be about employer attractiveness. It has to be about employer reliability, including in bad years. Otherwise the whole exercise turns into ad copy that evaporates as soon as the share price dips. 

The question for 2026 is not “how do we put a positive spin on layoffs”. The harder question is “what do we stand for when we know some people will leave in painful ways”. 

Branding the survivors: why internal audiences matter more than candidates after layoffs 

Most layoff communication is still designed for external stakeholders and legal risk. Yet the people who decide whether the employer brand lives or dies after cuts are the ones who stay. 

Survivors feel three things very quickly: 

1. Am I next. If the narrative is vague, they assume more pain is coming. 
2. Do I trust this leadership team. If the story does not match what they see, trust falls away. 
3. Is it worth giving my best here. If the company treated colleagues as disposable, they quietly recalibrate their own effort and loyalty. 

Employer branding that ignores these questions and jumps straight back to “we are hiring” misses the point. The external narrative will eventually reflect whatever survivors say in private, in reviews, in DMs to candidates, and in their own exit interviews. 

Post layoff, the employer brand is an internal thing first. It lives in: 

• The manager conversations about what happened and what is next. 
• The level of transparency about criteria, timing, and future risk. 
• The concrete support for both those who left and those who remain. 

Teams that treat survivors as a captive audience are mistaken. The labour market has a long memory, and LinkedIn makes it easy to walk. You cannot out advertise a group of disillusioned insiders. 

The EBN Dispatch Podcast | Employer Branding & Talent

The EBN Dispatch is your no-fluff podcast on employer branding, talent attraction, retention, and company culture served with dry wit and sharper-than-average insight.

Employer Branding NewsEBN

The long memory of talent markets 

Ten years ago, it was still possible for a layoff story to stay mostly inside the building. Today, workers run their own distribution channels. Screenshots travel and internal memos and videos always leak. “Impacted employees” write public letters dissecting leadership decisions in detail. 

Everything employers treat as internal can (and usually does) go public. Things aren’t like they used to be and exiting employees don’t feel compelled to keep dirty secrets on behalf of their ex-employers.  

I know from our own research that candidates search phrases like “layoffs at [company]” before interviews. Recruiters at other employers quietly share names of firms that handled cuts in particularly cold ways. Alumni networks become either a source of referrals or a warning label, depending on how people were treated on the way out. 

The long memory of talent markets means that: 

• Employer brand health is cumulative. You cannot reset it with a new tagline every two years if you keep repeating the same layoff mistakes. 
• Time does not automatically heal. A badly handled layoff may show up in review sentiment and candidate questions for years, especially in smaller markets and sectors. A dip in Glassdoor scores from layoffs takes 2+ years of good times to bounce back from.  
• Apologies and repairs matter. Leaders who acknowledge harm and adjust future practices can shift the narrative. Those who double down on spin tend to be remembered for it. 

The story is no longer “did you have layoffs”. Many companies will. The story is “how did you behave when you did, and what did you learn from it”. 

SPONSORED by Fathom

Momentum isn’t always progress, especially when you always end up back where you started.

Fathom helps you escape the loop. With insight, not intuition.

Break the Loop

The end of fair-weather branding 

Employer branding was born in an era obsessed with attraction. The big question was how to stand out in a tight labour market, how to make people swipe right on your company instead of someone else’s. That mindset still dominates many EB roadmaps. 

The layoff cycles of recent years have exposed the limits of that approach. When jobs are at risk, nobody cares about your quirky hashtag or the colour of your swag. They care whether leaders tell the truth, whether colleagues are treated with basic respect, and whether the organisation owns the impact of its choices. 

This is the uncomfortable conclusion. In 2026, employer branding will be judged far less by the energy of your recruitment campaign and far more by the quiet horror or relief of an exit call. Your “brand” is whatever people say to their partner at home that night, and whatever they post the next morning. 

Layoffs do not automatically destroy an employer brand. Pretending that layoffs do not hurt, or pretending that they are irrelevant to who you are as an employer, does. The future of employer branding belongs to teams that are brave enough to name pain, not polish it away. 

Takeaways

Employer Branding Glossary | EBN Wiki

A clear, human glossary for employer branding, EVP, culture, recruitment marketing and HR. Use it to align teams on definitions, find the right term fast and stay current with the language talent actually uses.

Employer Branding NewsFathom

Sources

The EBN Dispatch Podcast | Employer Branding & Talent

The EBN Dispatch is your no-fluff podcast on employer branding, talent attraction, retention, and company culture served with dry wit and sharper-than-average insight.

Employer Branding NewsEBN