27-year-old who's been laid off 3 times in 3.5 years: A 9-to-5 is ‘a false sense of security'

Rachel Rappaport jokes that she was laid off "before it was cool."

The New York City-based marketer was among the first wave of workers to be laid off as the threat of Covid-19 began emerging in the U.S. — she was working in the events industry and lost her job in March 2020.

While she can joke about it now, she tells CNBC Make It she remembers lying to her friends that she had just been furloughed and would be back to work in no time.

Unfortunately, multiple more layoffs since mean she now has a pretty thick skin about it.

How being laid off prepared her to look out for herself

Rappaport got a new job in the tech industry by October 2020 and did so well, she was promoted to a new role nearly every six months of her time there. By mid-2022, however, boom times at her company were beginning to deflate, and the business went through a big round of layoffs.

Rappaport remembers the company leaders saying they had made deep cuts across the company so they wouldn't have to do any more layoffs in the future. Even so, Rappaport knew better than to rest easy.

She began tracking her work achievements so she could prepare to talk about them in interviews, and updated her LinkedIn and resume to signal she was open to new opportunities.

By December 2022, the worst she feared happened — the tech company was undergoing another round of layoffs, and this time, her name was on the list to be let go. Thankfully, because she anticipated more cuts, she was already in talks with a data analytics company and was transparent that she had just been part of a layoff. She was offered the job of senior content marketing manager and started her new job in January 2023.

The 9-to-5 offers 'a false sense of security'

Rappaport stayed busy as the newest member of the company's four-person marketing team. She often heard they were drowning before she arrived. "When I first started, they were just so relieved because of how hard they were working doing multiple roles," she says. "And then when I started, I felt like the role was multiple roles within one."

For about nine months, Rappaport got positive feedback at her job, didn't get a sense that many people were being laid off, and definitely didn't hear that the company wasn't doing well.

So she was shocked to learn, on Sept. 5, that her role was being eliminated and the work dispersed back to the other three members of her team, despite her boss saying the position was essential.

"I just felt sick," she says of hearing the news. "It's unfortunate for everybody because the person who's laid off has to find a new job, and the people who are still there have now the expectation of doing more work that they didn't sign up for the same pay."

After three sudden layoffs in roughly three years, Rappaport is glad to see that talking about job loss has become less taboo. "It's kind of crazy how, in just those couple of years, it's gone from something that nobody talks about, to something that everybody has been through or at least knows about," she says.

That doesn't mean it's taken any less of an emotional toll. Rappaport says she tries to stay in good spirits by continuing to prioritize her health, like meditating and working out, as well as sticking to a daily routine.

It's also shifted her career plans: "It is a bit of a false sense of security, the whole 9-to-5 thing," she adds.

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Building security into her next career move

Rappaport is already back on the job market — while she'll get a month of severance pay from her ex-employer, the 27-year-old still has rent and bills to pay. But she's taking steps to build more security into her next role.

First, she's considering leaving tech to move into a sector that's less closely tied to the stock market. Second, she's looking for roles on TrueUp, an AI-based job board that matches candidates with jobs based on experience listed on their resume.

Third, she's does more digging on each company on her radar: She'll look into whether they've done any layoffs in the last year, and she checks their LinkedIn page to see if the company's headcount has gone down in recent months. "Even though they're hiring, to me that's a big red flag," she says.

Beyond finding another day job, though, Rappaport is considering getting serious about launching her own marketing consulting business, which she'd build on nights and weekends until it becomes her full-time career.

Until then, she has some feedback on how decisionmakers make cuts to their staff.

"I don't care what company it is, there's no reason that a person in that executive role is going to be close enough to the day-to-day to know who does what, how they're performing, and if that role is an impactful role," Rappaport says. "I genuinely believe that they need to spend more time listening to the people who really know."

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