Last Updated on July 8, 2026 by Fly High Coaching
Knowing what to do when you’re laid off can mean the difference between landing a better role in 90 days or spinning your wheels for two years. Most professionals jump straight into applying online, and that one move quietly costs them months. Are you clear on what actually works in the first 30 days after a layoff?
Porschia, host and CEO of Fly High Coaching, walks through the 3 most important things to do immediately after a layoff so you can protect your confidence, regain control, and make your next move strategically rather than emotionally.
She also breaks down the biggest mistakes professionals make right after a layoff. Things like applying before updating your resume, skipping your personal brand audit, and leaning on friends and family for market insight they simply don’t have. This episode covers how to calculate your financial runway, define your target list, and shift from job seeker to problem solver before you send a single application.
What you’ll learn:
- What to do when you’re laid off in the first 30 days to protect your positioning
- Why jumping straight into online applications is one of the costliest early mistakes
- How to stabilize emotionally and financially before making any career decisions
- The 3 criteria to clarify before you define your next role, so you are successful
- Why activating the right support system early beats piecing it together alone
Resources:
- Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Getting laid off can feel disorienting, especially when you’ve worked hard to build your career. We’ve helped hundreds of professionals navigate this exact moment. We’ll walk you through the three most important things to do immediately after a layoff so you can regain control, protect your confidence, and make your next move strategically, not emotionally.
Porschia: If you don’t know me, I’m Portia of Fly High Coaching, where we’ve helped thousands of executives and professionals soar to their full [00:01:00] potential in their careers. Most professionals make at least one of these mistakes in their first two weeks after a layoff, and it can cost them months in their job search If you jump straight into applying online, you’re likely doing it wrong.
What you do in the first 30 days after a layoff often determines the quality of your next role. Let’s break down what actually works. The first thing you wanna do is you wanna stabilize first, emotionally and financially. You can’t make good career decisions from a place of panic Pause before you react.
Being laid off is actually a traumatic event. There can be trauma around a layoff. There’s also an aspect of grief that is often overlooked when it comes to being laid off. So you wanna [00:02:00] normalize any of these potentially negative emotions that you’re having, so shock, anger, or fear, especially for senior professionals who might feel like they’ve dedicated even more of their lives to a specific job or company.
It’s important for you to remember that layoffs are often organizational and not personal. There’s so many reorgs, restructurings, sizings, so many terms for doing layoffs that are going on right now, and a lot of them have nothing to do with you personally. As part of stabilizing, you wanna get clarity on your severance package, your benefits, and the timelines of the layoff.
So understand your health insurance, bonuses, stock options, how long you’re gonna have severance pay for, all of those things. This is gonna help you to calculate your financial runway, [00:03:00] meaning your buffer time, and this can help to reduce any urgency that you might feel around making decisions, and again, reduce any panic that you might feel.
So do you have a financial runway of three months, six months, two years? That’s what you wanna calculate and figure out for yourself. This will help you to create what we call a short-term stability plan, and this is a 30 to 60-day plan of what’s going on in your life financially. So what expenses can be paused or reduced for different services that you use, products that you use, subscriptions that you have?
Also, you wanna think about what is your minimum acceptable timeline for landing your next role. If you want help structuring your job search the smart way, download our free Smart Job Seeker’s Guide linked below. Finally, you want to protect your professional identity. [00:04:00] You don’t want to internalize the layoff as a personal failure of yours.
Instead, you wanna reframe this mindset into, from thinking, like, “My value has ended”, or, “There’s something wrong with me”. Instead of that, you wanna think about this role has ended. Okay, that’s a mindset shift for you Executives who stabilize themselves first make smarter and higher compensation moves in the future.
The second thing you want to do is you wanna get strategic, not busy. Activity is not progress. Strategy wins. So how can you be strategic about your next steps? Something that you don’t wanna do, you do not wanna just immediately start applying for dozens of jobs For a few reasons. One, online applications, they have a low conversion rate, [00:05:00] especially at the senior levels and executive levels.
You’re competing with hundreds of other people online for roles, so the competition is very stiff, especially if you don’t have an in, if they don’t know you. Also, applying too early locks you into outdated positioning. Usually, when someone’s like, “Oh my gosh, I gotta just start applying,” they don’t… They haven’t redone their resume, they haven’t looked at or updated their LinkedIn profile, they might not even have a cover letter, and they’re just, again, applying out of panic.
We recommend, especially for people who are professionals that have substantial career experience, that you have your resume professionally redone. ChatGPT is not good enough. I talk to executives all the time who are trying to dictate their resume with ChatGPT, and they’re not getting results, to be honest with you.
[00:06:00] [00:07:00] You want to clarify your next move and the criteria for that. So what is the scope of the role that you want? What is the level of responsibility or hierarchy? Is this a manager level, leadership, director, senior director, C-suite? You wanna get clear on that targeting, because again, that’s going to affect your positioning with all of your professional branding documents.
You wanna have a good idea of the compensation that you’re looking for, the company culture that you wanna work in, and the level of flexibility that you wanna have in your next role. Do you want it to be remote? [00:08:00] Do you want to have a hybrid role? Do you wanna be in person? Do you wanna travel? These are all things that you should consider.
And you want to think about all of these things so that you can decide what you will not tolerate in your next role. Once you’ve done those things, you can audit your personal brand. So back to the resume, your LinkedIn profile, and your overall executive narrative. So if you have a bio, for example. All of these documents need to be aligned.
A big mistake is people just kind of copying and pasting their resume into their LinkedIn profile. You don’t wanna do that. A lot of people, don’t align their documents with where they’re going. Instead, it focuses so much on where they’ve been in the past And when you’re thinking about your documents, you can ask yourself the question, can you clearly articulate your value in 30 sec- in an interview when you’re talking to someone?
Is that value [00:09:00] clearly articulated when someone does a 5 to 10 second glance of your documents? You also want to define your target list. And so your target list are the list of ideal companies, industries, and roles that you want. Get very clear on what those things are because this will help to make networking and outreach more focused and also more credible.
You can create a great rapport and relationship with the people that you’re networking with once you have clarity around your target list. The best roles are rarely won by people who are just open to anything. They go to the people who are strategic. The third thing that is important for you to do is to activate the right support system.
Career transitions are not meant to be navigated alone. So you wanna tell the right people strategically. So think [00:10:00] about the people in your network, former leaders, peers that you worked with, board members, people in professional associations that you know, other trusted contacts. And when you reach out to these people, you’ve done your pre-work.
So you’ve already aligned your personal branding documents. You’ve already gotten clear on the types of roles that you’re looking for, your non-negotiables. So when you are ready to share with people that you have been laid off, you’re sharing a clear message about what you’re exploring in the future.
You’re already thinking about the solution and future focusing. You also wanna leverage professional support. I talk a lot about this. I have podcast episodes on what I call a career support system. So these are professionals who understand hiring at your level of the roles that you’re targeting Your family members, your friends, [00:11:00] sometimes even your coworkers, they can offer emotional support, but not really market insight into the job market, into the industries, into the strategies that you need.
They’re there to support you personally. Also, your family members and your friends are often very biased. They see you in a certain way. Generally, they love you. They think everything that you do is great. They think everything is perfect as it is. And a lot of times they don’t offer constructive criticism, and then even when they do, it’s not coming from a place of a professional.
You want to also consider getting expert guidance very early. Working with career coaches, executive recruiters, or executive search consultants, other industry insiders can be really helpful. I know that it’s very tempting to think that we can do [00:12:00] everything on our own, especially with AI, but I just had a conversation with an executive who’s been out of work for two years, almost three at this point, and he was really frustrated.
He told me, “I’ve done everything that people tell me to do on social media. I’ve had my resume professionally redone, and I use ChatGPT to customize it for every job, and I’m not getting any interviews.” This is not uncommon, guys, and so this is why you wanna get this expert guidance early. Because honestly, you can just do the math.
How many years’ worth of salary has this executive missed out on, trying to piece this whole thing together himself when he could have invested in working with a coach and potentially had a job by now? Another mindset shift here is you wanna shift from job seeker to problem solver.
Conversation should focus on how you add value, not what you [00:13:00] need. And this is when you’re out there networking, and then also in your interviews. This mindset is so important because it attracts opportunities rather than chases them. This mindset attracts opportunities rather than chasing them. Most senior roles come through relationships, not job boards.
So to quickly recap, first, after a layoff, you want to stabilize before you react. Second, you wanna get strategic instead of staying busy. Third, you wanna activate the right support system. A layoff can feel like the end of a chapter, but for many professionals, it becomes the turning point that leads to a better role, better alignment, and better leadership opportunities if you handle this moment correctly.
If you want a smarter, more structured approach to your next move, we’ve created a smart job seeker’s [00:14:00] guide to achieving success for professionals navigating this transition. You can download it below.
