Mass Layoffs Are Already INSANE in 2025 What's Next?

I lost my job to AI. I just got laid off, and I'm nine months pregnant. I just got a call from my work, and they let me know that I was getting laid off today. All right, so what we've all probably seen recently is that the job report added another quarter million jobs in the past month. It's the same old story we've heard for quite a while now. The economy really isn't that bad. Look at how many jobs are created. Then a couple months later, it gets revised down heavily, and the cycle ends up continuing. But, I don't know about you, I've seen a ton of people getting laid off just since the beginning of the year, let alone the entirety of the holiday season before that. So today we're going to take a look at some cases, some of the reasons why this is happening, and then also some of your comments from previous videos with your experiences. So if you want to be featured in a future video, leave it in the comments down below. But we're going to start off with what my For You page has just been littered with over the past few weeks. I just got laid off, and I'm nine months pregnant. I just got a call from my work, and they let me know that I was getting laid off today, and so I was laid off from work today. Well, not how I wanted to start my 2025. I was just laid off. I've once again been let down by working in tech for the second time in two years. I once again will be unemployed and searching for another job. So I was laid off six months ago from a company where I was in human resources, and it was because of financial reasons, right? And since then, I have submitted about close to 150 applications and have had two interviews. When I tell you I've submitted 150 applications, I'm talking about from a barista to HR manager. I'm going to be pretty honest, 150 applications is pretty light work for what we're going to see in this video, but I probably could have made an entire video of just these clips over and over and over again. So many different people getting laid off of various jobs now. There is definitely a correlation with a lot of the tech jobs, and some of them that can be taken over by AI, which we'll get to a little bit later, but it really doesn't seem to be slowing down anytime soon. The entirety of 2024 was a complete mess, and we're already getting predictions of what's going to be happening this year. Last year, my 2024 job predictions were both viral and accurate, so here's what I think is going to happen in 2025. I've talked about this a little bit on my podcast, but I really believe we're going to see more layoffs, but this time, it's going to be disguised as return to work. Low-key, Amazon is already doing this. Basically, I think we're going to see more companies call people back into the office with very limited notice, which is going to force some people to quit because this is not what they signed up for. Boom, instead of them having to pay people out, people quit. It's sketchy as hell. I have a feeling this is the year that employers increase social media monitoring of their employees and potential hires. Social media is not new, but all of the drama around the TikTok app in the US as well as in Canada makes me think it's going to get some extra attention. This is your sign to either private your account or make your username hard to find. Don't go posting any suspicious ----, okay? I think we're going to see the impact of AI for real, for real. I actually think this is a really good thing. I think companies are going to start using AI to help you streamline your work, which means the value you add is not going to be in the administrative hands-on tasks. It's going to be in your problem-solving people skills and soft skills. Okay, first again, AI, a little bit later we'll get into that. But the remote work being thrown out the window, the return to office in increasingly shorter time periods, almost forcing people to quit because there's no other option. It's been decently popular over the past year or so. There's been several stories that I've gone over. I know Patagonia, Dell is a huge one. I think Dell only had like three to five days when, again, many were hired saying that this was going to be a remote job forever. Here's your laptop. You could do it from your home and you have the Zoom meetings at certain times. But other than that, you're kind of set free. And now, of course, that's being peddled back and disguised as firing without really having to fire. The other thing I've gone over on my second channel, as well as social media in general, anything, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, you name it. Ironically, with all the clips that we watch on this channel, it's probably not the best thing to actually do if you're looking for a job, especially when you're talking about the job market or your company, your boss. Very dangerous game. We went over videos of people getting fired for TikTok's very dumb reasons, just making videos in the middle of working or badmouthing the company as if they're not going to find your username. I can even take it as far as all of the clips in this video. Maybe not the best light to talk about how many times you got fired over the past year. Even though I do have sympathy for you, crying and complaining on TikTok probably isn't what You can make the argument if it's fair or not, but this is the employer's market. They are looking for the absolute best of the best. They want a perfect resume, a whole bunch of experience, and no drama. We have a comment from one of you guys. Consider your social media as an extension of your person. Don't mix work with your personal life. And I get it for how ingrained it is in our world, but there is an option to make a lot of accounts private. I know that means you can't get the attention and the likes and the views and the validation you could get from random strangers liking your Instagram posts or watching your TikToks, but it does kind of put you in a crossfire with your employer if they don't like what you're uploading. I think one of the big examples of this, which is a very popular trend recently, many people grabbing their phones when they're on a Zoom call and recording themselves getting fired. Now I understand why people make these videos because it's the same script almost every single time. Whoever's doing the firing has absolutely no sympathy. Doesn't matter how long they worked or how hard. However, recording your employer or a previous employer and then getting millions of views on TikTok adds into one of the reasons why a future employer probably wouldn't want you to be on their team. So yeah, I get it. You could probably garner a whole bunch of attention and sympathy, maybe even a following. Still though, if you're actively searching for a corporate 9 to 5 when they are looking at everybody like a hawk. Probably not the smartest thing to put up online right now. One of the comments here from you guys is pretty telling and is probably one of the reasons why applications are so ridiculous when you look up sites online like Indeed. I got laid off last year and applied for around 2,000 jobs. I only started getting callbacks when I started to use AI to write my resumes. In the end, I got a job through a buddy at his company, so it never ended up working. But how many times have you seen one job opening have a hundred or a thousand applications? There's probably a good portion of them who aren't even writing it. It's basically scripts now auto sending out all of these resumes to every job imaginable. But the last sentence with him getting a job through his buddy at a company will also come up pretty soon. The job market is so bad that even MBAs from top programs are taking months to find jobs after graduation. Approximately one fourth of all Harvard MBA graduates have not been able to find a job more than three months after graduating. This is an all time record high. Two years ago, that number was only at 10%, so it has more than doubled. During the Great Recession, it was easier for top MBA graduates to find jobs than it is now. Just think about that. And other top MBA programs like Stanford and Wharton are reporting the exact same thing. It shows that no one can take this abysmal job market for granted. These numbers also show that the white collar recession is much worse than anybody thought. The current job market is making many people rethink their plans to get an MBA because they are not sure that it is worth the return on investment. Top programs can cost as much as a quarter of a million dollars. That is a lot of money to pay to struggle to find a job. Okay, so I will say right off the bat, I definitely did not get the grades to go into any sort of top school, any of the Ivy Leagues. However, if I did and I decided to get some sort of bachelor's degree there, the amount of money that I'd have to pay and how much I'd have to work and also kind of know some people to be able to get into a Princeton level school, in my mind, that should guarantee me a very well paying job. And if that's not the case right now, what am I supposed to say? What are you supposed to do, man? I personally would be very angry. I guess I'm lucky that I wasn't that good in school and dropped out of community college and didn't rack up five or six figures to get a bachelor's degree at a four year. Because what's the chances of you getting a job if even the people from the best schools in the country are having difficulties right now? Another statement about the job market that I've started to see recently is pretty straightforward. Regardless of the market conditions around work, regardless of whether you are a software engineer or a mathematician or a scientist or whatever, there is one thing that will remain to be true, probably for the foreseeable future, potentially till the end of time. That is the single most valuable skill that you can probably hope to have in the job market is strong communication skills. So that just turns into, it's not what you know, it's who you know. Another one of the big reasons why people would advocate for going to four year universities is the networking. I guess that's how many people are getting jobs nowadays. It's just kind of a dangerous game when you're talking about $30,000 to $50,000, $60,000 a year for networking. I'm just looking at it as if I was in that situation. Now, I'm talking to all you guys through a camera, but this is basically the most amount of speaking I do on a daily basis. I am not a social butterfly. Networking definitely isn't my thing, even if I did go to a four year university. So I'd probably feel trapped if I was in a lot of people's situation right now. But we have another comment from one of you guys. It seems that if you're not connected somehow, you will not get an offer. Likely not even an interview. Shotgunning cold resumes don't work anymore. I'm an engineering consultant, and 90% of my work has come through people I already know or networked with. Networking is the single best tool you have. Again, I would be completely screwed. But you often have to do it while you're still working. It may sound silly, but even if you have to volunteer at a company for a while to get noticed, I picked up some work inside some of my companies when I chatted up the project manager that I thought I could help two weeks later. I'm billable. I guess you have to bend over backwards and network with anybody you possibly can and volunteer your time just to be able to get a job. This is unbelievable. Here we have another comment from one of you guys that I think is just as bad. I lost my job last month at 58. I'm worried. I probably would be too because there's no real way to sugarcoat it. Companies want younger workers because they know that they'll be able to pay them less. Somebody who's 58 years old probably has decades worth of experience, and that comes with a higher salary, and that's just not what they want to pay right now. On top of it, they know how desperate these 21, 22-year-old kids getting out of college are, so it's way easier to pay them as little as possible and get as much work as they can out of them. So as a boomer who is retiring this year and has to look for work for the first time in 35-plus years, my observations. One, it's a lot harder than it was when I was a young man. You can just trot around dropping off resumes. No one will talk to you. Two, filling out applications online is far, far worse than filling them out in person. They want a resume and a cover letter, and then you have to fill out live within a 10-minute timeout the exact same information into their application. Preach! Three, you will never, and I mean never, hear from an employer again unless you're hired. When I was applying for work in the 1980s, I would get polite form letters rejecting me if they didn't want me. Now I just get ghosted. Four, pay is awful. Hours are awful. Benefits are awful. We can relate, sir. And I know we've seen some older people getting forced into retirement because there was no chance they were getting another high-paying job. And even though that sounds great, maybe I could retire five years earlier and be able to chill out even longer. But some just aren't prepared for retirement. There are some crazy stats. I think I'm going to make an entire dedicated video about it, but it's not nearly as easy going, eh, you know what? I'm going to retire five or ten years earlier. Most people do not have that kind of cash on hand, which then turns into survival mode, stretching out the small amount of money you do have for a longer period of time and kind of hoping you end up dying before you run out of cash. Pretty grim life, if you ask me. So these layoffs and this job market is hitting every single age. It really doesn't matter. Almost 100 educators are going to lose their job in December, and for what? Last night, the East Orange, New Jersey School Board voted to lay off almost 100 employees. But this is how the community responded. Look how many people are there. Look how many people turned out to show their educators and their schools that they love them and they care about them. But despite the room being absolutely packed, the school board still voted to lay off almost 100 people in December. A district employee said, we are already understaffed, and now our students are facing the ordeal of now having buildings with even less teachers, which means more crowded classes and less help and support for our students. How is that what is best for our children? Who lays off staff in the middle of the year? Middle of the year is kind of crazy, honestly, but I wanted to put this in because it was in New Jersey. It was probably about 30 or 45 minutes away from where I used to live, and I know it seems like I'm plugging my second channel a lot, but we had a whole dedicated video talking about teachers just straight up leaving the profession because of the new gen alpha kids and how horrible they are to teach on top of a lot of layoffs for financial reasons. I don't know what's going to be happening with teachers and schools coming up. It looks like it's in a really, really bad spot, so I don't really know what to say now. I would have said if you had a thick skin and could handle kids, maybe teaching wouldn't be that hard to find a job. But then we see financial cuts and a whole bunch of people getting laid off middle of the year. That's still crazy to me. Here we have another comment from one of you guys. I don't know how you do it. I finally got a job in August after sending in over 1200 applications. It sounds so ridiculous like he must be lying, but we've seen in previous videos there must be a website that would track every application that you send and how many people completely ghost you or say no or the various rounds of interviews and then ghost you or possibly finally getting a job and people will have actually thousands of applications and then get a job. One single job. This next clip I wanted to put in here because I had absolutely no knowledge of this and I don't think a lot of people do as well. So something to look out for if you're in a similar situation. Well, I wasn't anticipating fraud. Day three post layoff update. I was laid off on Friday. It is Monday. My husband was laid off last week as well. He was laid off on Tuesday. He has already filed for unemployment, so it's Monday and I wanted to file for myself. I get online, start filling out the little sheet. A pop-up comes up that I need to call this number. Okay, so I call this number and I start talking to this woman that there is a fraudulent claim associated with me. What in the pandemic that there was a lot of fraudulent claims for unemployment during that time and lo and behold, someone tried to file under me. They were unsuccessful, but the unemployment department has to clear out this fraud case before I can proceed with filing. So that was a curve ball that I didn't anticipate. And if you find yourself in my shoes, it happens. They say that it should take about a week to clear up. So I'll keep you all updated. Had no idea that that was even a thing, but surprisingly, with all of our data getting leaked left and right by any company imaginable, selling it to others, trying to scam each other. The list goes on and on. Of course, there's fraudulent claims for unemployment now, and some people could end up getting screwed. Maybe we'll just add that into the list for the next scam video that I make. I just had a meeting with my boss for about an hour about how I'm kind of a useless employee and how I need to be trying harder, even though I work literally every freaking day. Literally, I stay late like there are days where I can't even film or do anything after work because I just work all. I don't care anymore. I ordered some Uber Eats just to, uh, you know, I honestly, I don't care. I don't care anymore. I will. I honestly, I. If you can choose any other field of work, don't choose finance. Do not choose it. But OK, so I'm going to file this clip under the you probably shouldn't have posted it. I get it. I understand. Everybody's being overworked and underpaid and not being valued at all in a company. At least his full name wasn't his TikTok handle. But you're currently being employed by somebody who's probably monitoring your account. So actively talking about your boss and complaining about it and then having a, you know, kind of a little bit of a breakdown. Probably not the best thing to do. I know it sucks out there, man, but you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot. I feel another one of the comments from you guys. I agree that the job market is trash right now, but many people aren't doing themselves any favors by posting on social media so much. Pinpoint accurate with the last clip probably would delete it. Four professions are really struggling to get jobs in this market right now. They are coders, social media managers, graphic designers and writers. And here's why. A new study by Harvard Business shows that these four professions have seen a massive decrease in the number of jobs available since, wait for it, the launch of chat GPT in 2022. That's right. AI is taking their jobs. And we've talked about this to you repeatedly. I know, I get it. We've heard this on the news and articles all the time over the past year or so. AI is going to be taking everybody's jobs soon. We're going to be on UBI. All the robots are going to take over. It's going to be the end of the world. I know it's super dramatic. I get it. But there are actually some jobs that are going in the toilet right now. One of them that she talked about coders was how long ago? Five, six, seven years ago, everybody went in for computer science. They were going to be a programmer, a coder, instant ticket to a six figure job. You are going to be set. And within a few years, everything's super oversaturated. And now AI is starting to wiggle into that market. Spending five or six figures on that degree in that field doesn't really seem worth it anymore. I lost my job to AI. I'm an award winning journalist and writer currently working on my first book. I lost my job to AI. If you don't know me, I'm Dana Galearo. I'm an author and an editor. And in my full time, like money making endeavors up until Monday, I was a freelance writer and editor. I recently lost my job to AI, chat, GBT. I'm a copywriter and small businesses basically realized that that service is less expensive than hiring me, even though I don't make very much money. All right, you guys, AI is taking over all of data analytics jobs. I know I said before that AI was not taking over data analytics jobs, but I've changed my mind and 100% is. This is a huge bummer for me because I love working from home. I love working with data. I love my job. But I've just kind of accepted that this is the new reality. So the best advice that I can give for you is to just not even apply. Whatever you do, don't apply for that data analyst job, especially if you meet all of the qualifications. And the few people who do end up applying for those data analyst jobs are going to feel really silly. OK, so I just want to put that last clip in because I didn't really understand it. Like, was that sarcasm? And I just did not understand it. Or she's just really telling everybody who's into data analytics to just give up. Shrivel up and die. Probably not the best advice, but one of them who is the copywriter, I think, is another funny instance of the 2020 side hustle grind when everybody needed to have 10 different avenues of income, all these different side hustles and making money online. One of the huge ones that a lot of those gurus were pushing was to become a copywriter. Apparently, everybody needed one under the sun and it was just free money. I guess you just needed a couple of classes and then you were official. And now that really doesn't seem to be the case anymore, I guess I took that one over. So there goes that side hustle. A lot of the writers as well. I know that there's a meme going around from a YouTube video of a freelance writer losing his job to A.I. And right under it is an A.I. summary of the YouTube video. So you didn't even have to watch the whole thing. Just the irony. So I don't really know what the freelance writing entails because I feel like at least right now, some people could realize that it's chat GBT writing articles or stories. But I think that'll get even harder to distinguish in the next few years when the technology keeps advancing. So you can start making the argument for all of the artistic and creative endeavors. The A.I. art that we've all seen that doesn't really look that good, but again, advancing in the future. All the creative writing, graphics, designs, looks like it's kind of in jeopardy right now. Here we have another comment from one of you guys. Man, I'm still searching since December of 2023. The I.T. market was good when I was in school. That's exactly what all these C.S. degrees are saying as well. Now it's so bad. I don't know what to do. One of the problems with a new niche having really good pay, any of the tech jobs, all of those videos you've probably seen of employees making $400,000 a year and they get to go into the Facebook office and play ping pong and eat like ice cream all day. Everybody ends up going for those types of degrees. It gets oversaturated along with those same companies not needing to have as many employees as it did during the pandemic. Kind of a lose-lose situation right there. I am absolutely done with this job market because I just had an interview where the person was like, yeah, we found the person yesterday that we actually want to hire, but we still want to talk to you and then proceeds to not ask me any questions and then just says, we'll let you know if the other person doesn't work out. Like, how is that professional in any way? I learned that if something like this happens again, I'm going to push back more because that's ridiculous. Just wasted my time for two days to do this. And this is after multiple reschedules and also being late today to the interview. So I don't think I want to work for this company anyway. I think this video goes pretty well with the other series I have on my channel of just terrible job listings, the demands, the low pay that they have the audacity to put on Indeed just out there in public. Completely giving this guy the runaround for absolutely no reason whatsoever. It literally would have been better if they just ignored him and he just went on with his day with the other applications. I really don't understand what type of market this is, man. It's absurd. But I do want to end off this video on at least a little bit of advice. I wasn't going to say a positive note because I don't think anything in this job market is really positive right now, but at least some advice for some people struggling right now. If I got laid off today, here's exactly what I would do next. This is coming from somebody who's lost multiple jobs and has continued to find a new job each time. It even happened to me right before Thanksgiving once, so I know what it's like to go through the holiday season. The first thing you need to do is file for unemployment. Figure out what the laws on your state when you're able to do it, but understand it can take some time to process, especially around the holiday time, and you want to get that started as soon as possible. The second thing I would do is brush up my LinkedIn page, update your description, update your latest role. Next, obviously, I would update my resume, make sure it really speaks to my strengths, make sure it leads to what I've done most recently in my role. And that's when I dive into the search after that. Things are going to slow down in holiday time. Hiring does still happen, but it happens less. So this is your time to really prepare and make sure you're making that great first impression. Then I would make my post on LinkedIn. Your post on LinkedIn is not about the company that laid you off. You do not need to thank them for their time. I am looking for a new position after a layoff. I am looking for this type of role. I bring these types of skills to the table. These are the types of companies that I would do best in. Please share this with anybody you know who may be hiring. That call to action is important. This groundwork is what you need to set in order to get that momentum going on the job search. Diving right in before all that stuff is ready is going to hurt you on the search. Take the time and do it right to get going with the right momentum. I'm very happy I never had to do any of the LinkedIn stuff. It just seems like a nightmare to me. But I mean, even though we all enjoy watching these types of videos, I guess because the amount of content that's being uploaded every single day of people getting laid off or complaining about their jobs. If you're in the same situation, I probably would say avoid that. I know it's probably easy views and attention and followers, but you and I both know that all of these companies are watching what everybody does on social media now. So probably not the best thing for you to do, especially if you're looking for a job or currently employed and then actively complaining about your job. You're on the fast track to getting fired if you do that. But that's all I got for you guys today. Let me know what you guys think in the comments down below. YouTube thinks you'll like this video popping up on screen right now, but hopefully you guys enjoyed this video. If you did, please leave a like and I'll talk to you guys later.