Laid off, then hired into a better job

Where she was

Hannah was one of forty people cut from a software company on a Tuesday morning call. She’d been there five years and had led the marketing for two product launches. A week later she had a severance check, a fresh LinkedIn banner, and no idea what to apply for.

The call

She booked a single session first, which is what I’d suggest to most people in her position. A layoff is not the time to sign up for three months of anything. We used the hour to sort out what she actually wanted next, rather than what was available that week.

What we worked on

In the single session we listed what she’d done in five years. The answer surprised her: she’d done more product marketing than general marketing, and she liked it more. That became the target.

A month later she came back for the sprint. We rebuilt her résumé around the two launches, with numbers she’d forgotten she had. We picked twenty companies instead of applying to two hundred jobs, and she reached out to someone at each one. She also wrote a short, honest line about the layoff for interviews: what happened, what she learned, what she’s looking for. She stopped dreading the question.

The move

She joined a 200-person fintech company as product marketing lead in early June, a level up from her old role and a higher salary. It came from one of her twenty outreach emails, not a job board.

What was harder than expected

The waiting. Three weeks of nothing in April, when two processes stalled and one company froze hiring. We used a session for the plain work of keeping going: a small weekly target, a walk every afternoon, and one conversation a week that wasn’t about jobs at all.