Corona: We’ve Been Laid Off. Learn How We Got Hired As A Team

It’s Corona time and working inside a crisis is already a very dynamic and uncertain situation. Additionally being laid off and losing your job lets you completely forget about the global crisis, because you are dealing with another one.

First of all, it is not your fault, or anybody else’s fault that it happened. Don’t blame yourself. I have learned during my job search there are plenty of possibilities and you have a chance to improve your life.

Team Building Is Important And Shouldn’t Be Underestimated

The IT department I have been working at had 29 people. All of them are really nice characters. Everybody knew everybody, their strengths, their weaknesses, their personality, and how we could deal with it. We understood the communication and the difference between communicating with humans and human roles. We worked so hard for it that it would be a shame to simply start over again. If you like your colleagues, it would be a great opportunity to try to get hired as a team.

Do you think that companies don’t have so many possibilities? You wonder how many companies want to grow. It might not be public on their websites, but they do have plans to dot it. All you have to do is take the initiative and ask.

Twitter As A Hiring Platform — Get Your Networking Skills Ready

You are working in short-term work and/or you already have been laid off due to the crisis or you are waiting to be laid off during the next weeks or months.

Also, use your LinkedIn profile and set it up open and properly.

Tweet it out. Be transparent about it and ask your community to share it.
Of course, it takes a little bit of work before you actually can do it. You need to be active within the Twitter community and tweet about interesting stuff and/or answer interesting and valuable tweets. This will give you a good follower base to start with.

You don’t even need to be the person having many followers. The reach comes with sharing your tweet. So make sure your profile is public, you have DMs open and you have a properly filled out Twitter profile.

It is said that most of the jobs tweeters have got due to the Twitter community. So definitely get ready to dive deep into the community.

Eventually, someone will share your tweet and someone will write you an email.

Prepare Yourself, Your Group And Prepare The Documents

Ask your team, if they would be interested in group hirings. Most of them will be interested, as they are being laid off and need to consider every chance.

Use Google Docs and Spreadsheets to organize yourselves.

1. Companies are interested in you.

Have a public spreadsheet with

• the names of the candidate,
• short descriptions, which is only about their skills
• LinkedIn profile link

For example:
Brain Adams, Software Developer using Java, Python, and Kotlin. Experienced in CI/CD
Maria Adriano: Frontend Developer using ReactJS, Redux, GraphQL

If wanted: Add another column, if someone wants to change the role: For example changing the role from developer to the product owner or to QA automation engineer.

2. You are interested in where your team is more likely to be going

Create another spreadsheet “I applied here”, this will be used internally only for you and your team.

First of all, there is no blame, if someone is not interested in taking different paths and challenges. The change of path will even happen after you have signed contracts and are being onboarded to the new teams and company.

The spreadsheet consists of the names of your team in column one and the names of the companies the row one as the head.

After a company has presented itself (we will come later to this) you can put states into it.

Consider these state:

• interested
• no (as in not interested)
• applied
• rejected
• approved (you are awaiting an offer)
• accepted (you accepted the offer)

Don’t make the mistake, like we did and use signs like X or (X), because we don’t know, what they mean. A blank field means “no”.

If a company has done a good job in presenting itself, you will see, that people will put plenty of “applied” into their cell.

3. Collect information about the company

A third spreadsheet comes in handy. Have the name of the company, the contact person’s name, phone number, and email address inside the spreadsheet.

• Add a column for description. What does the company do?
• Add the state of the next step inside the sheet. What is the team supposed to do?
• Add a column, that says how many people could be hired from the team.
• If you work in tech, add an extra column for work-related descriptions: How the team works. What product is being built? What goal and vision it has.
• Finally add a column, where you put in protocols for Q&As.

A spreadsheet with example companies. Every entry is made up.

And now you are good to go for first contacts.

Acquiring Companies For Group Hiring

I’d like to say right at the beginning that there will be companies, who see a chance to filter the best of you out. There will reject and accept your colleagues and put you into rigorous testings. All of this can happen. Keep up the good relationship though. Because they are taking their time to listen to you and taking the time to present themselves in a different way they usually do.

The first contact.

You are the first person to be contacted. You have to be able to tell the team’s current situation. For example: When they are available for a new position, how many people are to be hired and which role do they have, etc.

You are also the representative of the team. You need to get the first contact information. Remember, we have prepared a spreadsheet to collect information about the company. This is where the stuff goes in. Make the description very brief, because it is just to get an idea about the company and the project.

Ask definitely how many people could be able to be hired and ask about information on open positions. It is possible that companies don’t have the position yet, but are willing to open them up or to re-write them for you.

Suggest your company a Q&A online call and explain how beneficial it could be. Along with that, inform them about the format, which I’ll present later.

After the call, send the requested information and also the public spreadsheet with a list of candidates you have prepared earlier. This is helpful for the company to plan and to consider hiring you all in total. So, please, do create this spreadsheet.

Invite for a Q&A

Why is this good? Normally companies have their own recruitment processes and it is fine if they want to be strict about it. An online Q&A is a video call session, with representatives of the company and you and your team. In our case, there were always around 20 people involved. Even our head of department participated in interesting listening to interesting companies.

The pro’s about having a Q&A are:

First: Your colleagues might have questions you weren’t thinking about. This is natural and fine. Some topics are important to someone, which are not so much important for you.

Second: The company can save some time and introduce itself in front of a bunch of potential candidates. We already have received feedback that this has saved some time in the application process later. The interviews focus on the candidates and learning to know the teams themselves.

The invite happened via Google calendar. This is important for you as the organizer because you can remove unnecessary participants when copying the events and have a great template for the description. If another teammate is interested, he can be added later.

Speaking of the calendar description: Please, do fill it with some information. Handling 20 people’s questions plus the people from the companies, will take a lot of time away. Always be patient and do repeat information along the process.

Remember the column of the company description and working environment? You can use these to fill out the description.

Use the Calendar/Hangouts feature to create a hangouts link, otherwise, the first thing a recipient should see is the link to the video group call, followed by the rest of the info. The most important information should go first.

Pro-Tip: Don’t ask your teammates for a date or time, that would suit them. The experience shows you would go into an agreement hell and never come into an agreement. But be careful about their time. They will have individual interviews from individual applications. Ask them about how many companies they could handle daily/weekly or in a total number. This makes sure, their wishes will be taken into account.

If someone misses a Q&A, no worries, you or someone will take notes.

The Q&A

Before you have that, create a Google docs document and let your teammates create questions upfront. If you have Q&As with multiple companies, you will see, that some of the questions can be applied to all or some of them. Do copy them into different documents.

• Questions for company a
• Questions for company b
• …

At the beginning of the document you can find all the questions and when the Q&A happens the record keeper can take notes right below the document. The share link will be put into the spreadsheet that contains the list of the companies.

The Moderator

Have a moderator. This person should not be the same as the note taker, because you need the focus for each of the roles individually in the sessions. A video call can be quite exhausting in general, as our brain tries to compensate for something which is not there: The physical face to face conversation. This exhaustion is quite extended in crisis times as the stress level of the crisis itself is added, as well as the uncertainty of the sudden unemployment.

Here is a list of questions you might find useful, especially as a tech team:

• Would you give me a brief description of the company and the products?
• How big is your company? How many people work in IT?
  How much do you want to grow?
• What is the goal you want to achieve?
  Until when? Do you have a timeline?
• Can you tell me about the budget and the financing?
  How does the company deal with the Corona crisis? And what does it do to secure itself?
• Scrum? Company-wide or just the IT department?
• How do you collaborate with different departments?
  How do you deal with dependencies? (Collaboration)
• How do you lead your teams (empowered teams)? (freedom, responsibility, etc.)
  Cross functionality?
• Company culture?
  Benefits, life-work balance, work time, vacation days per year, health insurance, company pension, home-office, training (workshops in-house/outside, conferences, courses, etc.)
• What kind of tech stack? (e.g. web application, mobile, IoT, cloud, etc.?)
• How would my day at your company look like?
• What are your thoughts about people working remotely?
• What are your thoughts about office dogs?
• What are your conditions for failure?
  What are your conditions for success?

The Record Keeper

The second person with responsibility is the record keeper. Someone who focuses on listening and who has good and fast writing skills. The person will stick on the document and keep writing, basically what the representative of the company says. Try to make notes of answers from the questions above and further questions which participants will ask. The technique is like mediating.

The Structure

1. Introduction round
2. Company presentation
3. Q&A

Before we move forward: On a video call, mute yourself unless you talk. This is important to make sure, that no echo occurs, children or dogs in the background don’t accidentally hijack the audio and that you are focussed on the call.

Introduction round:

It is really good to start with an introduction of the candidates. It will make sure that the names of the candidates are connected to a face. As a candidate, you need to make sure that your video and audio is working properly and that you show your best self on screen. The introduction should not take longer than two sentences. Make it short. In this stage, it is not a competition yet. If there is one, it will start later. But the goal is to get hired as a team. So don’t create a competition yet. The introduction is just to get an impression of who you are.

For example, you could start, what role you had in your last position, and for how long you have worked for the last company. Perhaps mention just the type of the project, but don’t go into any details, as it will come later. You can organize the turns. It is very effective to let the candidates nominate the next candidate until everyone introduced themselves.

Company presentation:

In the next step, the company has the stage. They can now introduce themselves as a person and the company. It’s completely up to them how they do it. You will notice, some of them will talk freely and some of them have a structured presentation. Note if a company sends a representative, which is not from the production team, you might not be able to get so many details from the production side. You have to decide if the person still did a good job or not.

This is the time when the company starts to apply to you. Lay back and enjoy and see if the company can convince you to work on their projects or not. The record keeper is taking lots of notes at this time and will make sure that many notes are being taken, rather than keeping them in a formatted state. You will see, some of the representatives talk slow and some have a good paste. Try to focus, which is important for you. Can you imagine working in this company? Do you agree with their values? Do you like the product and the projects? What is their technology stack? Are you able to bring experience, or do you need to learn the stack? Would you work with the stack? What else has the company to offer?

Q&A

When the representative completed his presentation or talk, it is time for the Q&A. Ideally, you have a video call with a chat. Let the candidates write the questions and the moderator can present them. In smaller groups, it is also possible that the candidates ask the question themselves. This makes sure that the meaning is delivered correctly. Make plenty of use for the chat. Some video call programs also have raise-hand options. It is totally up to you how you structure and organize it.

A tip: If no one has yet asked a question, the moderator can pull out the document with collected questions and can ask one question which has not yet been answered during the presentation. This will warm up the candidates and gives the company a bit of the feeling, what kind of questions there are, and what is important for you. It also shows that you are well prepared.

Discuss The Next Steps

After you have finished the Q&A and being satisfied with the information, the next question for everyone is: How do we proceed? I have seen these questions literally from every side. As the organizer, you need to answer this question beforehand.

Our next step was to hand over the process to the company. It is still the company’s decision if a group hiring is possible or not. Clarify the next steps right on the call with all participants. For example: “…and if you are convinced, send them your CV. I have put the contact details inside the list.”

Wrapping Up

When no questions are left give the company a big thanks. They will leave the call. But you and your teammates are going to have another 10 minutes to discuss how you liked it. The company will do the same on their side. It is really good to know, what the others think. It will make sure that you don’t miss anything and it gives you a feeling about how exciting the company will be.

Remember the spreadsheet “I applied here”? Now you can make your first mark with “interested”, “no” or leave the field out. The document is of course shared, as all of the documents are. And everyone in your team can edit the documents so that you don’t need to do it for everyone.

The Application Process Changes The States

You will see that some of the companies will put you through whole application processes and some others are quick about getting you onboard. Along the way, you will be able to update the spreadsheet “I applied here”. Be transparent towards your teammates. It is interesting for everyone to know, where a possible working together would be.

Create a chat group

My teammates and I have created a job exchange group on Whatsapp, to be able to update everyone, when something new happens, to share knowledge about hiring processes and to share interesting job offers for those who want to proceed in a different course. We also shared contact details with possible employers and headhunters. Ask first, before sharing it! In this group, we also discussed, what is the best way to write and structure a CV. I’ve written mine always by myself, but you can use resume.io to write CVs and resumecoach.com to write cover letters. These days it is pretty easy to do just that.

Inside the description of the group, you can collect some links to the documents, so that no one loses them.

Group Hirings And Company Culture

Group hiring is a huge effort for the company. So, let’s thank every one of them, who would be willing to do that. The most important thing to take care of is the current company culture. You, as a team, definitely need to be able to adapt to a new environment. You will be part of the company and you will take part in forming the further developed company culture later. At the start, it is important to earn the trust and adapt first.

We have learned that companies have hired whole teams already, teams who have been laid off as well. The first thing they needed to do, was to push their happiness and motivation again. You as a team can help, if you push your team happiness a bit. Again: See this as a chance for new opportunities. The future will get brighter. Do celebrate often with the team. Give out many thanks to yourself and your team members. You deserve it!

Before you start into the new job make use of the vacation left so that you start fresh into the new job. Treat yourself well.

I wish you a happy opportunity-hunting!

Companies Who Took The Initiative And Considered Group Girings:

At least, in the following, I’d like to present some companies, who already had the idea to hire a larger team, or who checked it with their superior and board members.

doctari: Health tech is pretty stable in a Corona crisis. doctari has checked the possibility and has figured out, they would love to hire later. So check them out, when it is time.

dotSource, a company making other company’s e-commerce businesses strong by building its e-commerce platform. They are still looking for a couple of developers and other roles. The current tech stack is PHP, Java, and some Javascript. The teams work with shop systems like Magento and Shopware and it comes with tons of company benefits and a really good company boot camp to get you on board.

A special thanks go to Schul-Cloud. They are one of the few companies being ready to grow and to take a whole team of 27 people. Schul-Cloud is a German government-funded project which provides schools with online solutions and a huge platform for online learning and online schooling. The topic is already pretty interesting and the next huge thing is the fact that the source code is open source. Check it out!

Job Search Assets

Check out this shared Google Sheet which is created by Florian Feichtinger and enter your name.