51–60 of 144 posts
Same thing happened to me in the early 2000's during the first dotcom crash. Except my contractor rate was nearly double my full time rate. It was rather dumb, but obviously they didn't bring _everyone_ back that they had laid off.
> Lawrence Dearth, the president of staffing company Insight Global, Instead of naming your staffing company like a nondescript CIA front, why not call it "Dearth of Talent"? No one would ever forget it. Maybe it can be a cold-call icebreaker, too.
I’m not a lawyer, but I have a vague idea about my rights and firing people to hire them as contractors instead is illegal in both jurisdictions I know, France and Norway. Firing people to hire contractors instead is risky because you need a reason to fire people. The reason could be economical, but one could easily argue in court that if the company is hiring contractors instead, well, it was not the real reason. Th…
I know people who got laid off at my company who are trying to stay tied into that company however they can. If you're a contractor for now, fine. You still get to maintain and build new connections to try to get back into an FTE role later on, hopefully at the end of the day this being a minor speedbump in your career. I can appreciate the thinking. I might actually choose that path if it happens to me.
But if you were laid off, it means the company didn't value you a lot. OK, maybe they didn't value you much because of their current needs--which may have changed since you were hired. But making a bet on staying in the company's orbit just in case they have a change of heart doesn't seem like an especially wise one in general even if it was a "no hard feelings, it's just business" breakup.
There are boomerangs where someone went to a startup for a few years and that sort of makes sense but that's different from being laid off.
That’s exactly my situation, while it wasn’t technically a “laid-off” but rather me leaving a toxic one, but when my previous boss -company CEO- knew I’m starting my own consultancy company, he got in touch about several big project coming in, part of me want to reject it for obvious reasons, and the other part to forget the past and use the opportunity to pivot that to build good portfolio.
That said, my advice would be to weigh whether or not the portfolio boost is worth dealing with any toxicity you may or may not experience. I suppose it's possible (not trying to assume, just that I don't know) that s/he doesn't know how toxic you felt the place was.
Some places stipulates that if you return within some number of months after being laid off, you forfeit a prorated amount of your severance. This may make returning to the same company significantly less attractive.
Yeah, this happened to me (late 2021): was laid off, had at least one Sr. Director in an adjacent silo spinning up the process of lateral'ing me into his org, but HR confirmed that I would have to pro-rata repay severance should I resume FTE during the severance-paid interval (in my case, 6 months). I wasn't surprised as the last thing HR and bean counters want is to let an employee "double-dip", but assuming the int…
I’m not a lawyer, but I have a vague idea about my rights and firing people to hire them as contractors instead is illegal in both jurisdictions I know, France and Norway. Firing people to hire contractors instead is risky because you need a reason to fire people. The reason could be economical, but one could easily argue in court that if the company is hiring contractors instead, well, it was not the real reason. Th…
Also in the UK contractors are paid a lot more than full time staff!
I’m not a lawyer, but I have a vague idea about my rights and firing people to hire them as contractors instead is illegal in both jurisdictions I know, France and Norway. Firing people to hire contractors instead is risky because you need a reason to fire people. The reason could be economical, but one could easily argue in court that if the company is hiring contractors instead, well, it was not the real reason. Th…
> Lawrence Dearth, the president of staffing company Insight Global, Instead of naming your staffing company like a nondescript CIA front, why not call it "Dearth of Talent"? No one would ever forget it. Maybe it can be a cold-call icebreaker, too.
I’m not saying that.