The New York Times published a story today announcing that Amazon will lay off thousands of employees this week — possibly as many as 10,000. This is similar to the number of people that Facebook laid off.
If you’re one of these people, you have my sympathy. I’ve gone through four layoffs myself, and I have some tips to share below.
Remember that you have Amazon on your resume.
As a FAANG/MANGA company, Amazon has serious “street cred” among recruiters and hiring managers. Emphasize the “Amazon” item on your resume, mention it in your LinkedIn headline…
that appears just below your name.
…and play up your Amazon experience in interviews.
Borrow a trick from the former Facebookers / Metamates who got laid off and make a “badge post.”
Facebook/Meta has the outgoing employee tradition of the “badge post” where you write a farewell post on their internal portal. When the big layoff happened last week, many laid-off Facebookers/Metamates posted similar posts onto LinkedIn, complete with a photo of their badge (the photo side has just the person’s photo and name, which are already on their LinkedIn profile).
These generated a lot of sympathy, re-connected a lot of people who’d lost touch, and from the comments to these posts, also got a lot of attention from recruiters, hiring managers, and other people who either were trying to fill positions or knew of open ones.
Once the initial shock of getting laid off has worn off, write and post an “Amazon badge post” — along with a photo of your badge — on LinkedIn as soon as possible. Don’t forget to add the “Open to Work” indicator to your profile photo!
Do this sooner rather than later. The longer you wait, the more “badge posts” will be out there, and you don’t want to get lost among the multitude.
Join an Amazon alumni group.
Every company, once it gets big enough, has at least one alumni group founded by former employees for networking and finding new jobs. Amazon is no exception, and you should look into the following:
- Day One Syndicate is probably the biggest and best organized of the Amazon alumni groups. Definitely join this one.
- The Amazon Alumni group on LinkedIn is a private group with over 9,000 members at the time of writing.
- AlmaConnect has a group for Amazon alumni.