How to Conduct a Layoff with Dignity: What HR Leaders Need to Know
The way you let people go says everything about who you are as an organization.
Your company spent months recruiting someone. Onboarding them. Getting them up to speed.
And then the day comes to let them go, and suddenly there's no plan.
Layoffs are treated as reactive events when they're actually inevitable ones. Every organization at some point goes through some version of a reduction in force. The question isn't whether it will happen. It's whether you'll be ready when it does.
Jena Dunay, founder of Recruit the Employer, joined the podcast to kick off our new layoff series with something most HR leaders don't want to say out loud: the way you off-board people should match how you onboard them. And right now, for most companies, it doesn't come close.
(00:00) The Founder Who Became the Layoff Lady
Jena Dunay is the founder of Recruit the Employer, an outplacement and career development firm. She started her career on Wall Street in investment banking at the New York Stock Exchange before spending over nine years in learning and development, holding roles from trainer to Chief Learning Officer across a range of growing organizations.
She has 42,000+ followers on LinkedIn, is a LinkedIn Learning instructor with over 167,000 learners, and has been featured in Business Insider, Forbes, Built In, The Skimm, and The Muse.
She's also someone who has been laid off herself. That experience shapes everything about how she approaches this work.
She calls herself the layoff lady, and she leans into it. Because someone has to talk about the things nobody wants to talk about.
(04:00) You Probably Have Core Values on the Wall. Do They Apply Here?
Most organizations spend significant time and energy defining their core values. Integrity. High standards. People first. You've seen the language.
Jena's first question when she works with a company facing a layoff: do those values show up in how you're letting people go?
Here's what happens when there's no off-boarding plan in place:
Plans get pulled together haphazardly at the last minute
The exiting employee feels like a number, even if they never felt that way before
Employer brand takes a hit that's hard to quantify but very real in the talent market
The legal exposure increases significantly
The people who remain are left with survivor's guilt and a trust gap that doesn't fix itself
That last one gets overlooked more than it should. There's research on the productivity loss that follows a poorly handled layoff. When people don't feel secure, they're not engaged. And when they're not engaged, the business feels it.
Off-boarding, done well, is just onboarding for the exit. The investment is the same. The intention should be, too.
(10:00) The Operational Side No One Wants to Think About Until It's Too Late
There's an emotional dimension to layoffs, and there's an operational one. Both require planning. Neither can be skipped.
On the operational side, you're coordinating across multiple teams and working through decisions that require real lead time:
Severance and separation agreements. What are the amounts? What are the state-specific requirements for final pay, termination pay, accrued PTO, or bonuses? These vary by location and can't be figured out the day of.
Communication plans. Who needs to know what, and in what order? How are you communicating to employees directly impacted? To those remaining? To the public or shareholders if applicable? There is a difference between being transparent and oversharing, and that line requires deliberate thought.
Rebuilding trust. This part of the plan gets skipped entirely by organizations that treat the layoff as the finish line. It isn't. The people who are left behind are watching how you handled this, and they're forming conclusions about what it means for their own futures.
The argument against planning in advance is usually framed as a fairness concern: if the plan exists, shouldn't the affected employees know sooner? It's a reasonable instinct, but it misunderstands what the planning actually covers.
The work involved in a thoughtful layoff process requires collaboration with finance, legal, and leadership. That's operational preparation, not secrecy.
(16:00) What Outplacement Actually Is (And Why It's Not the George Clooney Movie)
When Jena talks to HR leaders who haven't encountered outplacement before, they sometimes reference Up in the Air. She is not George Clooney. She is not the person delivering the news.
Outplacement is what comes after. And there's a wide range of what that can look like.
"We give somebody an ultimate makeover in their career." — Jena Dunay, Founder of Recruit the Employer
At its core, good outplacement helps the person who just got laid off navigate the job market with confidence. Not just a resume review and a job board. Actual coaching. Clarity on what they want next. Rebuilt confidence. Marketing materials that reflect who they are. Interview preparation for someone who may not have interviewed in five, ten, or fifteen years.
The job market has changed significantly even in the last few years. A senior leader who hasn't gone through a job search since before LinkedIn became what it is now has a real skills gap, and it has nothing to do with their professional abilities.
What to look for in an outplacement provider:
They lead with confidence building, not just resume tips
There is real personalization involved, not bulk content and a portal
The strategies are current, not built for the job market of 2012
The person feels seen, not processed
Jena's point for HR leaders advocating internally for outplacement: if you're just checking a box, put that money toward severance instead. The only version worth investing in is the one that genuinely helps the person land somewhere good.
(20:00) Losing a Job Is One of the Most Stressful Things That Can Happen to a Person
There's data on this. Research consistently places job loss alongside death of a loved one and divorce as among the most stressful life events a person can experience.
Even people who were planning to leave. Even people whose performance was strong and who were told clearly this wasn't about them. Jena speaks from personal experience here.
The feelings that come with it are real: shame, self-doubt, anxiety about the market, second-guessing whether you were actually as good as people said.
Those emotional realities affect everything downstream. What jobs someone applies for. Whether they negotiate salary. How they show up in an interview. A person who carries that weight into their search will perform differently than someone who's gotten some support in processing it.
This is why the best outplacement isn't just tactical. It's the piece organizations often miss when they think about what a soft landing actually means for someone.
Where Do You Start?
Most organizations don't build an off-boarding plan until they need one. And when they need one, it's already too late to build it thoughtfully.
The work that needs to happen before a layoff ever occurs: know your communication plan, understand your outplacement options, and build the post-layoff trust rebuild into the plan from the start. Not as an afterthought once the dust settles.
The full conversation covers survivor's guilt and how to address it with the employees who remain, the role middle management plays in stability post-layoff, and what rebuilding culture after a reduction in force actually looks like in practice.
Connect with Jena Dunay: Website: recruittheemployer.com | LinkedIn | Recruiter Unlimited
Connect with Traci here: https://linktr.ee/HRTraci