How Do You Find Your Next Job After a Layoff? | Michelle Schafer

You were on a video call with your whole team, cameras on, when you found out your role was gone. Weeks later you are still sending applications into silence, and you have started to wonder whether the problem is you.

It is not. But knowing that does not get you out of bed on a Tuesday, which is why I wanted you to hear from Michelle Schafer. Michelle is a career coach in Ottawa who has guided nearly a thousand professionals through career transitions, and she has been restructured twice herself. So when she talks about how to find your next job after a layoff, she is not reading from a textbook. She reinvented herself both times.

The Market Is Not in Your Head

First, let's name the obvious. This is a brutal time to be looking, and you are not imagining it. Michelle sees it across her whole client roster and all over LinkedIn.

More layoffs mean more people competing for fewer openings, and the recruitment process itself has slowed down. A single posting can draw a thousand applicants or more. Meanwhile the timeline has stretched. A couple of years ago, four to six months was a normal search. Now I have a client who has been looking for over a year.

That math changes what works. The old approach, which was to send the same resume everywhere and wait, stopped producing anything but silence.

It's not good enough anymore just to spray the marketplace with resumes.

Michelle Schafer

Michelle watches people do it anyway, because panic is efficient at making us busy. They dust off the resume, send it to hundreds of organizations, customize nothing, and then feel crushed when the phone never rings. Still, the fix is not more applications. It is a target, and then a plan.

Nobody Warns You That a Job Loss Is a Loss

Here is the part that surprised me most in our conversation, and it is the part almost no one says out loud.

I was downsized a couple of years ago, and I had asked for it. I wanted the package. I wanted to go build this business full time. And I still felt discarded. People stopped calling. The questions stopped coming. Something I did not expect to grieve, I grieved.

When I told Michelle that, she did not treat it as a strange reaction. She treated it as the most normal thing in the world.

It's a part of you that now is gone. And so there there is a grief. Like when you talk about feeling discarded, it's really speaking to that loss.

Michelle Schafer

What Actually Gets Lost

Because so much of our identity is wrapped up in our work, separating the person from the job takes something out of you. And it is never only the paycheck. You lose colleagues. You lose the routine. You lose the bus ride where you listened to podcasts, and the title that answered the question at every party.

One of my clients put it in five words that I have never forgotten. She said she was a former director, and now she was nothing.

We live in a culture that says pick yourself up and find a new one. Grief does not move that fast.

So if you have been telling yourself you should be further along by now, consider that you may be asking a grieving person to run a marketing campaign. Both things are true at once, and the second one goes better once you have made room for the first.

The Shame That Keeps You From Telling Anyone

Michelle asks every new client the same early question. Not what do you want to do next, but who in your support group are you leaning on right now?

She asks because shame shows up fast, and shame isolates. People assume that if they had been better performers, this would not have happened to them.

Job loss happens every day. Like probably thousands of people lose their job every single day, all around the world. Are there that many bad performers? Of course not.

Michelle Schafer

She told me about a client who waited six months to tell her own adult children she had been let go. Six months. The woman had been with that organization for over thirty years, so there was a lot wrapped up in it.

When someone is that reluctant to say it out loud, Michelle flips the question. Imagine your closest friend lost her job. What would you want to do for her? People answer immediately: check in on her, bring her a meal, take her for coffee. Then Michelle asks the question that lands. Is it possible other people would want to do that for you?

When You Cannot Write Your Own Resume

That same client ran into a wall that should stop every high performer cold. She could not draft a single part of her resume.

She couldn't articulate her achievements. She honestly felt that at the time of her job loss, everything that happened before was kind of like a mirage.

Michelle Schafer

Thirty years of work, and when she sat down to list what she had accomplished, it felt like none of it had been real. Of course it was real. But she could not get it onto paper, because she had never had to put words to it before.

This is the Articulation Gap in its harshest form: the distance between the impact you create and the impact anyone else recognizes. Most women meet it when they want a promotion. She met it on the worst day of her career.

Your Leave Story

What finally moved her was not a resume template. It was language. Michelle works with clients on what she calls a leave story, which is what you say when someone asks how work is going and you do not have the job anymore.

You do not owe anyone the bare facts of the restructure. Instead, you talk about what you loved, the value you delivered, and what you want to do next.

They get to tell the story. The story doesn't tell them.

Michelle Schafer

Is It Ageism, or Is Nobody Hearing Your Value?

I brought ageism to Michelle because I am working with women in their late fifties and early sixties right now who are convinced their age is the thing standing between them and the job.

Michelle does not pretend ageism is imaginary. But she pushes back hard on where people put the blame, because the version she sees most often is fixable.

It's not good enough anymore to expect that our vast experience will just speak for itself.

Michelle Schafer

She wrote about this on LinkedIn after seeing a jazz quintet whose oldest member is eighty two. They sold out the room. Not because of their years, but because they still brought it. Audiences still got something out of being there.

Experience works the same way on paper. Thirty years in project management is a number. The specific projects you led, the budgets you managed, and the impact those projects had are the value. In fact, Michelle tells clients to strip the "forty years of experience" line off the resume entirely and zoom in on results instead.

Most of the time it is not your age that cost you the job. It is that nobody heard what your experience actually produced.

Stand in Front of It, Not Behind It

And when a client tells her the interview went badly because of age, she looks at the resume and finds something else.

It's not because of their age. It's purely marketing. So, you know, I'll say to people, don't stand behind your age. Don't kind of cower from it and don't be shy from it. Stand in front of it, promote it.

Michelle Schafer

Age as the explanation is usually a limiting belief, and limiting beliefs are assumptions we never test. We rarely have any facts behind them. Still, they stand in our way all the time. If this pattern sounds familiar, it is the same one I wrote about in why your hard work isn't being recognized at work.

Michelle's Five Steps for What Comes Next

This is the part I asked her to walk through, because a roadmap beats panic every single time.

The Three Keys She Starts With

Step one is where most people get stuck, so here is what clarity actually means. Michelle assesses three things, and she is blunt about why. When any one of them is out of alignment, you end up back in a job search.

And if you run that exercise and still feel stuck? Michelle has a hack for that. She takes a client's completed assessment plus a scrubbed copy of their resume, with every identifying detail removed, uploads both to ChatGPT, and asks it to suggest career options that fit those skills and preferences, along with reflection questions to narrow them down. One client, heavy in government relations, had never once considered chief of staff. Now she is researching the role and talking to people who hold it.

Where the Jobs Actually Come From

Since eighty percent of opportunities come through networking, the obvious question is where to spend your time. Michelle had two answers, and neither one is a job board.

Be findable on LinkedIn

Recruiters approach people on LinkedIn every day about jobs those people never knew existed. But that only happens when your profile is complete and you are visible. Visibility does not require you to become a thought leader either.

Commenting is the new posting.

Michelle Schafer

Ten minutes a day in your feed, adding a real perspective to someone else's post, does the job. Not "great post, Rosie," which does nothing for either of you. A thoughtful comment shows what you know. And write it yourself. Michelle is firm that AI generated comments are not landing well right now, and a typo just proves a human wrote it.

She had a client competing for the CEO role of an association who nearly lost it over this. The recruiter went into her LinkedIn profile and flagged that she had not posted since 2017, eight years earlier. She did get the job. Then she changed her habits for good.

Tell the people already around you

My own clients reach out to former coworkers and complete strangers before they will tell their own families they are looking. Michelle's favorite story makes the case better than any advice could.

A client dropped her son off at a street hockey game and introduced herself to the other parents. One dad asked what she did professionally. She said she was looking for work, in IT. He turned out to be the chief information officer of a large tech company in Ottawa, he asked for her resume, and two interviews later she had the job. She had no idea what he did when the conversation started.

Opportunities come from the strangest places, but only after you say out loud what you are looking for.

What I Want You to Take From This

Go back to the woman who could not write her own resume. She was good at her job for thirty years. She just never had to put words to any of it until the day she needed those words most, and then nothing came.

That is what I do not want for you. You are doing the work right now. You are solving things nobody sees. But if the only time you ever practice saying it out loud is the day you get downsized, or the day you finally want the promotion, you will sit there like she did, staring at a blank page.

So start now, while you do not need it. One line a week: what you did, how you did it, and what changed because of it. Keep the list somewhere you can find it. That list is your clarity, and clarity is what gives you composure and conviction when the moment arrives.

Because your value did not leave with the job. It just needs words.

About Michelle Schafer

Michelle Schafer is a two-time restructuring survivor turned career coach who has guided nearly 1,000 professionals through successful career transitions. Recognized as one of Ottawa's Top 20 Career Coaches in 2020 and 2024, she works with clients to define their transferable skills, build confidence, and pivot into meaningful work.

She is the author of Cultivating Career Growth: Navigating Transitions with Purpose, available on Amazon, with a free chapter on her website. You can book a thirty minute complimentary chat with her at mschafercoaching.ca.

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