Why Companies Are Posting Jobs While Laying People Off

If you're an active job seeker in this market, pretty sure that you can relate to the following scenario. Suppose you see the perfect position. You spend a couple of hours on the application. You tailor your resume. You go and write the perfect cover letter. You follow it up with targeted networking. You do everything that you're supposed to do. But then you go and check on the actual company. You go and do your homework. You're looking through latest news releases just to kind of get an idea of what they're up to. And then you find something really interesting. They just announced a massive layoff just a couple of months before. Then you're sitting there thinking to yourself, hey, wait a minute. They're laying people off at the same time they're actively recruiting for new roles. What gives? Well, I'm gonna tell you. Hey everybody and welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, my name is Brian. I'm the founder of A Life After Layoff, a career strategist and a corporate recruiter. And I've made it my mission to demystify how job search and hiring works at major corporations. And I've spent the last 20 years of my own career on the inside of this process, working for companies like Amazon, Corn Ferry, FedEx, Ford Motors. And what I'm gonna explain to you is something that most people never get to hear from somebody who's actually inside those rooms. First, I wanna say something directly to y'all. You're absolutely not crazy. You're not misreading the situation. You're not being paranoid or any of that stuff. The job market is genuinely not making any sense right now. And there is kind of a good reason for it. And I'm gonna put it in the form of some numbers. Between 18 and 40% of all job postings that you're seeing in the United States right now are actually potentially ghost jobs, jobs that companies have posted with no real intention of ever filling. And it's not some sort of conspiracy or anything like that. It actually is coming directly from one of the largest ATS systems in the world, Greenhouse. And it's also supported by data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which admittedly can be hit or miss. But there's also other studies that support the fact that there are a lot of fake jobs out there. And in fact, in June of last year, there were 4.7 million reported job postings in this country and only 5.2 million actual hires, which means it's potentially 2.2 million phantom jobs. And here's one that made me pretty angry, so I'm pretty sure it'll make you upset as well. But a recent survey asked hiring managers directly, why do you post jobs that you have no intention of filling? And 62%, unbelievably said, they do it to make their current employees feel replaceable, to keep them on their toes, to keep them anxious, to keep them compliant. So in other words, there's companies out there who are manufacturing this fake job market to control people who already work for them. And I think we see a lot of this happening in these return-to-the-office mandates for remote work. So what that means is they're using poor, unsuspecting people who are unemployed and just trying to get back to work. There's literal collateral damage for that strategy, which is so messed up. So let me break down what's actually happening when a company is laying people off and then posting jobs at the same time, because it's really not just one thing. It's four potential things happening simultaneously, and I think we need to understand all of them. First reason is they're not laying off the whole company, but rather they're restructuring things. And this one catches most people off guard. So you've got this company that announces a layoff, and the headline hits that there's 10,000 jobs being cut, 20% reduction, blah, blah, blah. But what that number doesn't tell you is that the cuts are almost never uniform across the entire company. So what's actually happening is this. They're eliminating and cherry-picking specific roles, specific levels, specific divisions, maybe in specific locations, while simultaneously growing other parts of the business. And oftentimes, it might even be with the exact same position as they just got done eliminating. And I've seen this one happen a dozen times myself, personally, where a company will cut an entire management layer, let's say the middle management. We're seeing that happening a lot. It's very publicized. And they'll cut it from an entire division, but then that same week, the technology division gets three new headcount approvals. The announcements in the headlines say layoffs, but then the career pages say that we're hiring, and really, both are true at the same time, but it's just not giving you the entire picture of what's really going on. And if you start to pay attention like I do when I'm looking at the news headlines, you start to see this pattern emerging everywhere. Recently, Amazon announced that they were cutting tens of thousands of corporate roles throughout 2025 and into 2026, but at the same time, they're spending $80 billion on an AI infrastructure project and aggressively hiring machine learning roles. And Meta, at the same time, has announced thousands of cuts across their reality labs and some of the AI infrastructure initiatives. And then they turn around and offer million-dollar salaries to try to cherry-pick certain AI engineers from their competitors. So the company isn't laying off because they're hemorrhaging cash and they need to stop the bleeding, so to speak, but rather, the position that you're actually working in has died. That's a completely different thing, and it really changes how you start to look at your job search. The next reason is cost-cutting, and this one is a little harder to say out loud because it hits really close to home for a lot of people, but I do think it needs to be said. One of the primary reasons why companies conduct layoffs is not because the work necessarily went away. In fact, in a lot of cases, it's even amplified, but it's because they have found a way to get the work done for a lot less money. So essentially, there's three versions of this. Version one, suppose they split one expensive role, Reed, somebody that's probably senior, has a lot of experience, has a big paycheck, and they split it into two separate cheaper ones. I've personally watched it. I've probably been the victim of this where they take a certain salary and then they eliminate that role and then replace it with two part-time or kind of lower-level headcount, doing the same exact job, basically all the same work, same output, but now they've just been able to reduce the cost, and this is oftentimes when you leave an organization, you get laid off, and you look back a couple months later and your same division that laid you off is now publishing your job that you just got laid off from, and you're thinking to yourself, like, hey, wait a minute, I thought that they didn't need this role anymore. They actually did need the role, they just didn't need your expensive salary and benefits package to go with it. The second version is that they moved the role to a lower-cost market, and it doesn't necessarily mean that they're offshoring the role, though that is indeed happening quite a bit, but it's sometimes just a matter of moving something to a different region. Maybe a company cuts 500 jobs in a very expensive Bay Area market and then moves them to Iowa or some other place where it's significantly less expensive, so basically they're posting the same amount of jobs, but it's a net zero because they're cutting these roles to replace them with much cheaper ones in this other location, but it appears that they're actually hiring people, and the final version is something that we just touched on a couple minutes ago, and this is something that is becoming much more prevalent and, frankly, an issue, is that they're taking these roles, they're replacing them, and then offshoring them overseas, so you'll see companies that announced a major layoff and then suddenly they have all these roles that are showing up in some country overseas somewhere. In a recent survey of 600 business leaders, it found that 30% of companies with recent layoffs had replaced a lot of those same workers with offshore employees. And to throw salt in the wound, one in five of these departing employees was required to train their replacement as part of their exit. We're also seeing that happening right now with AI as well. Another one to watch is IBM. In 2024, IBM had 173 jobs listed in India, but by early 2025, that number had blown up to 3,866, and their US listings barely moved at the same time. So basically the work is still a need for them, but they no longer have to worry about carrying the really expensive worker who's got the benefits package and the expensive healthcare. They can just ship it overseas. And here's what analysts at Forrester are now predicting. Half of all the layoffs that companies are attributing to AI are going to result in those workers being quietly rehired offshore or at significantly lower salaries, not because AI replaced them, but because AI was the cover story and cheaper labor was the actual real strategy. Now, the third reason why you might see jobs posted at the same time they're laying off is that the job posting isn't necessarily for you. It's actually for a group of investors or specifically shareholders. Now, I want you to understand something about how most companies work that we aren't normally taught in day-to-day life. And when a company's stock price is under pressure, which let's face it, it almost always is, leadership needs to start getting creative about their storytelling, stories about the future, about growth, about how they can improve last quarter's record profits by an even bigger margin. And then there's only so much that they can wring out of the proverbial rag. And unfortunately, layoffs, counterintuitively, I suppose, often help tell that story. And this is something that's pretty disgusting to me. Bloomberg data shows U.S. tech company stocks rose an average of 5.6% in the month after a layoff announcement. So in other words, they lay off people, the stock market rewards them for it. In case in point, when Block cut 4,000 of their workers in early 2026, which is 40% of their workforce, their stock jumped a whopping 24% in a single day. Investors were probably pretty happy about that, while a lot of people were very unhappy about that. So the company announces layoffs, they cut all this cost, the stock goes up, and now they need to maintain the growth narrative. So what do they do? They post jobs, not necessarily because they're actively hiring, but because they want to have an active career page that signals to the market that the company's investing in its future and that it's growing. And this does happen. In fact, Congressional Research Service documented this, that companies use ghost postings to quote, project growth and strength to investors in the market, which seems pretty shady and kind of not totally legal. So essentially, you're applying to a job that exists just to reassure stockholders, yet that shareholder, that stockholder, doesn't even think about you at all. And then we have reason four, they realize that they made a mistake. This one is the most human one of the bunch, and it probably happens more than companies want to admit. You lay off 500 people, you're moving really fast, you're under a lot of pressure from the board or the private equity firm. You cut the headcount that looks most redundant on paper, basically working off of that proverbial spreadsheet. And then a few months later, you realize you cut somebody who was actually holding something together that you kind of needed, maybe didn't quite understand what they were bringing to the table. And this one is pretty painful for the person who's been laid off and has moved on. And now they're trying to figure out what to do about it. So they post the role again, and they usually do it pretty quietly, like whoopsie daisy. Usually under a slightly different title, maybe they move the role to an adjacent department, but it's almost always at a lower salary, but not all the time. Remember Block, who laid off those 4,000 people in February of 2026? Well, within weeks, some of these employees were actually being called back, and one was told that his layoff was a clerical error. Now, how do you really sit there and feel good about your long-term prospects at a company who just laid you off without even realizing who they were laying off and why they were laying you off, and then comes back with a tail between the legs saying clerical error? Can you feel confident going forward there? Now, I wouldn't say this is even rare. This is happening more and more as these companies announce these massive layoffs. Forrester projects that by 2027, half of all companies that cut customer service roles due to AI will be rehiring them for similar positions. The same pattern is playing out across a lot of industries. I'm sure that we'll see the same thing in the software industry. The difference here is, and this one's something that we get to manage expectations on, the person who got laid off is not usually the one who gets the callback. It's usually a new hire to reset that salary, to reset the tenure, the vacation, banking, et cetera, to start from scratch and basically spend time building relationships that that previous person had spent time building. Now, these aren't all the reasons, but these are some of the reasons that I'm seeing that are kind of emerging in today's market. But I wanted you to understand some of the mechanics and what to actually do with them. So let me tell you what this actually means for your job search, because understanding the system is only useful if we actually do something about it. So first, we have to decouple ourselves from our reliance on just applying for jobs on a job board. So many people utilize job boards exclusively and don't do anything else. And if the hiring rate per posting is literally half of what it was in 2019, then treating job board opportunities as the be-all, end-all in your job search is probably a mistake. It's not that you shouldn't apply online, because I'm not saying that at all. We absolutely should be doing that, but it can't be your only strategy. And for a lot of people, that's all they do. So it is, to me at least, very obvious that there is a lot more competition for a lot fewer seats right now, and you've got to start mixing up your strategy. To see the truth of it is, the real market, the jobs that are actually getting filled, not the fake ones, but the actual jobs that are getting filled, are disproportionately filled through relationships, referrals, direct outreach, before a posting even goes live. Here's a little hint. Us recruiters are looking at job postings as kind of a last resort. We are going off and looking for our own candidates first, and we're looking at who's in our networks, and who is coming through referrals. Then we go to the job postings. We don't often fill roles directly from job postings. And generally what happens is, the role gets posted publicly because the human resource department requires it, even if they have their own candidate already in mind, or a senior leader has a buddy that they want to hire, or the posting is just made out of compliance. And what happens is, even if there's a candidate that a senior manager already has in mind, or there's an internal candidate, or three that are moving through the process, human resources is going to require them to publish the role externally for compliance sake. So the decision maybe is already underway before you've even sent your application. So the job is like technically real, but your application is not realistically being considered. Second, when a company is laying off and posting simultaneously, look at what they're laying off, and more specifically what they're hiring for. This is market intelligence that most job seekers completely ignore. So in other words, if a company is laying off 2000 customer service roles, and then they post 500 AI engineering roles at the same time, that's kind of telling you what direction they're going in. The skills that they're eliminating are tied to the old model, and the skills that they're trying to build through these job postings are ones that they think that the future requires for their organization. So we have to pay very close attention to this, and where our career needs to be, not just with this particular company, but overall, where your career's heading. And third, the salary of the posting may not be the salary of the person that they just laid off. So using some of these data points that you may have accessed before, a glass door, et cetera, may not be all that accurate going forward. And when you're negotiating an offer, especially when that company's had recent layoffs, you need to understand that the salary band may have been deliberately preset downward. So just keep that in mind. The person who may have been in this role before you could have been earning 20 or 30% more, and the company has no interest in paying that anymore. Now, it doesn't mean you shouldn't negotiate, because we absolutely should. This just means that you need to come armed with the latest good market data, and not just what the company's offering. And make sure that you make a case for what the role is worth, not what they've necessarily decided to reset it to. Make it hard for them to pass your candidacy up because you bring so much to the table. So here's the thing about everything that I've just walked you through. Knowing the system is half the battle. But the other half is knowing how to position yourself when that real opportunity does present itself. So you have to be the person that they are already thinking of. There's ways to do this. And yes, in this job market, things are competitive, and it is getting more difficult to stand out. So you've got to think outside the box. Obviously, you have to have a good resume. And if you've struggled with writing a resume that actually delivers what recruiters are looking for right now, check out my course Resume Rocket Fuel because it's meticulously designed to give you the exact process for writing your resume the way recruiters and hiring teams wanna see it. So we're not gonna be guessing about what they're looking for. We're actually going to deliver them very targeted and purposeful resumes. The link is in the description below. And then if you wanna get in front of the right people and start building a reputation, getting around this whole process of fake jobs, the job posting market, it just, it sucks. You wanna make sure that you're leveraging targeted networking to your advantage. And there is a method for approaching networking so that it actually bears fruit. And I teach my process in unlocking LinkedIn. And if you wanna work through your specific situation with me directly, I do have some coaching spots available. You can check out my website, A Life After Layoff, for that. Okay, so that's why companies are posting these jobs at the same time they're laying off. And it's kind of baffling. It's kind of disappointing, but it is, I guess, to be expected anymore in this broken system that we're operating in. And it's unfortunately designed that way. But once you understand that, you can stop playing their game, which was rigged against you to begin with. You can learn the rules, and then you can reclaim control in your career. And I'm teaching you how to do that right here. So hopefully I will see you on the next one.