Cleared Recruiters Have a Message to Give as Layoffs Keep Striking

2022 should be deemed the year of layoffs. Over the summer, Silicon Valley was hit as Twitter laid off 30% of its recruiting teams before a total hiring freeze, and both Google and Apple set companywide stop on bringing in new talent. Apparently, this was just the tip of the iceberg.

Just last week, The Washington Post announced the newest victims of Q1 2023 layoffs at a town hall meeting. Along with a few other household names (NPR, CNN, Buzzfeed, and ABC), it seems like media industry is the latest casualty of the 2022 layoff theme.

One company in particular, Gannett, declared a required five-day unpaid leave over the holidays this year, 401(k) matching coming to an end, and of course, a hiring freeze.

Over thanksgiving even, we heard of a peculiar layoff story where an organization sent a text message to relieve 2,700 employees from their duties.

What Layoffs Mean for Cleared Recruiting

What does this mean for cleared recruiters? Our industry is largely untouched by this layoff mania, thanks to the stability of contracts.

While we’ve experienced some layoffs – mostly through organizations that work both the commercial and federal space – it’s nothing of the caliber that we have seen this year.

Really, this should be a focal point of your conversations with candidates toying on leaving the cleared industry…or considering coming back. We know that the amount of cleared talent does not match the sizable list of openings, and so pulling those people back in (perhaps who are more easily indoc’d thanks to continuous evaluation) is a way to boost our candidate numbers.

A big grievance from cleared recruiters is that commercial companies are poaching cleared talent. With the commercial industry continuing to be a shaky employment decision according to recent headlines, now is the time to push full steam ahead on branding the work in national security (and for your company) as the best decision a candidate will ever make.

THE CLEARED RECRUITING CHRONICLES: YOUR WEEKLY DoD RECRUITING TIPS TO OUT COMPETE THE NEXT NATIONAL SECURITY STAFFER.