You got the layoff email. Or the ‘Business Update’ meeting invite. Your manager looked uncomfortable. HR was or wasn’t there. They said the words: “This isn’t about your performance. We’re eliminating positions due to restructuring and business performance.”
You believed them. Maybe you even felt relieved—at least it wasn’t you, right? At least you were good at your job.
Then you see the new job postings. Roles you’re qualified for. Roles doing exactly what you are known to be good at. You apply. You speak to former colleagues. You get nothing. Not even a rejection email.
That’s when you think: did they lie to me?
The Awkwardness No One Talks About
Here’s what I’ve learned from watching companies handle this badly: it’s not always that they think you were underperforming. Sometimes it’s that they can’t face the discomfort of bringing you back.
Think about what that conversation would require. Your manager would have to look you in the eye and say “Hey, remember when we eliminated your job and you had to explain to your family that you lost your income? Remember when you scrambled to find new health insurance? Well, we have an opening now. Want to come back?”
That’s excruciating. For them.
So they don’t do it. They post the role publicly and hope you don’t notice. Or they notice you’ve applied and they just… don’t respond. Because responding means acknowledging what happened. And acknowledging what happened means feeling the guilt of it.
Your former colleagues see your application in the system. They know you’re qualified. But they also know that hiring you back means admitting that maybe there was another way to handle team restructuring. It means facing the awkward reality that they’re still here and you weren’t.
The social cost of rehiring you is higher than the business cost of hiring someone new.
The Guilt We Won’t Name
Companies like Block and Microsoft have been explicit about framing layoffs as “underperformance” or failure to meet “minimum standards.” At least that’s clean. Brutal, but clean. There’s no ambiguity about why you’re not being rehired—they told you that you weren’t good enough.
But most companies don’t do that. They hide behind restructuring and market conditions. Which means everyone involved—your manager, your former teammates, the hiring managers looking at your application—they all know the layoff probably wasn’t either really about restructuring or they aren’t comfortable enough to make a bold decision.
Maybe it was about cost. Maybe it was politics. Maybe it was just bad planning. But it wasn’t about the abstract business forces they told you about.
And now they’re stuck with that guilt. Hiring you back would mean confronting it. It would mean admitting, at least implicitly, that the decision was wrong, unfair, or poorly thought through.
It’s easier to just… move on. Hire someone who doesn’t carry that history. Someone who doesn’t make them feel bad.
The Social Fabric That Breaks
When you lay people off, you change the relationships between everyone who’s left. The survivors watched you get cut. They attended the awkward goodbye Zoom. They divided up your responsibilities. They made peace with your absence.
Bringing you back disrupts all of that.
Your former manager has to confront the fact that they couldn’t protect you the first time. Your former peers have to reconcile the fact that they kept their jobs and you didn’t—and now you’re back, but that history doesn’t just disappear.
The new people who joined after the layoff? They heard about what happened. They know the company does this. Hiring you back is a reminder that it could happen to them too.
Tech workers who’ve been through layoffs have fundamentally lost trust in their employers. But it’s not just the people who got laid off who lost trust. Everyone lost trust. And bringing you back forces everyone to confront that loss of trust again.
What You Represent
You’re not just a qualified candidate. You’re a walking reminder of the company’s worst moment. You represent:
- The promises that were broken
- The uncertainty everyone felt (and still feels)
- The fact that “high performance” doesn’t actually protect anyone
- The reality that the company makes decisions based on spreadsheets, not loyalty
When the hiring manager sees your name in the applicant list, they’re not just evaluating your skills. They’re feeling all of that. And it’s uncomfortable.
Hiring someone new is easier. That person doesn’t carry emotional baggage. They don’t make anyone feel guilty. They don’t remind everyone of what the company is capable of doing to its people.
The Impossible Position
Here’s the cruel part: if they do reach out to rehire you, it’s awkward. If they don’t reach out, it’s hurtful. There’s no clean way through this.
When layoffs are truly not performance-based, best practice is to reach out and offer jobs back to former employees who already understand the company and culture. But best practice assumes people can handle emotional discomfort professionally.
Most people can’t. Most managers would rather face the inefficiency of hiring and onboarding someone new than face the discomfort of rehiring someone they laid off.
So you’re left wondering: Was it performance? Was it personal? Was it just that they couldn’t handle the awkwardness?
The truth is probably all three. And none of them. It’s just humans being human—avoiding discomfort, protecting themselves from guilt, choosing the easier path even when it’s not the better path.
What This Means for You
If you’re being ghosted by your former company, it’s probably not because you’re unemployable. It’s because you’re uncomfortable.
You’re a reminder of a decision they’d rather forget. Every time they see your name, they feel something they don’t want to feel. So they look away.
This isn’t about your worth. It’s about their capacity to sit with discomfort. And most people’s capacity for that is pretty low.
So what do you do?
Stop waiting for them to overcome their discomfort. They won’t. Emotional avoidance is powerful, and corporate culture is built on it.
Let go of needing them to acknowledge what happened. They probably can’t, even if they wanted to. The guilt and awkwardness are too much.
Find people who don’t have that history with you. Who can see what you’re capable of without feeling bad about how you left. Who can hire you without confronting their own moral compromises.
Those people exist. They’re just not at your old company.
If You’re a Leader Facing This
You have someone in your applicant pool who you laid off. You know they’re qualified. You also know it would be weird to bring them back.
Here’s what I’d ask you to consider: whose comfort are you prioritizing?
If you’re avoiding rehiring someone because it would be awkward for you, for your team, for the company—you’re putting your emotional comfort ahead of doing right by someone you wronged.
Maybe the layoff was necessary. Maybe it wasn’t. But either way, if this person is qualified and you’re not hiring them because of the social discomfort, you need to own that.
You need to own that you’re choosing ease over integrity. That you’re choosing to avoid guilt rather than face it. That you’re allowing your discomfort to dictate business decisions.
And if you can’t bring them back because it would be too disruptive to team dynamics, too awkward for their former manager, too uncomfortable for everyone involved—then you need to admit that the layoff did more damage than you acknowledged. It didn’t just eliminate a position. It broke a relationship permanently.
That’s worth sitting with. Not because you need to fix it—maybe you can’t. But because you need to understand the actual cost of layoffs. It’s not just severance and unemployment. It’s broken trust, fractured relationships, and a permanent awkwardness that makes it impossible to undo the decision even when you want to.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Most companies don’t rehire laid-off employees because they can’t handle the emotional reality of what they did. They’re restructuring, investing in AI, shifting resources to different priorities. The business has moved on.
But the people haven’t. The guilt is still there. The awkwardness is still there. The broken trust is still there.
And it’s easier to hire someone who doesn’t remind you of all that.
If you’ve been laid off and ghosted, that’s probably what’s happening. They’re not evaluating your qualifications. They’re protecting themselves from feeling bad.