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How Airbnb’s Brian Chesky handled layoffs during the pandemic:
“I don’t want to presume that we did everything right. It was very painful. But we laid out a series of actions based on our principles. The first thing is we wanted to have a generous severance. The second thing is we said, ‘This is a health crisis,’ so we made sure that everyone had one year of health coverage and health insurance.
The next thing we said is, ‘They need a computer to be able to get a new job.’ So we said, “You can keep your Apple laptop.’ And then we also connected them to some other supporting services. But we did two other things that were pretty out of the box. The first idea came from my co-founder Joe. He said, ‘We should take a dedicated portion of our recruiting team, because we’re not going to do a lot of hiring. We just did a layoff. But maybe we can keep some extra people, and maybe they can create the equivalent of an outplacement service to actually try to place people at other companies.’
The most novel thing we did was we created an alumni directory where we allowed anyone who was being laid off to opt in to joining a public directory where we would publish your information, your LinkedIn, and recruiters could contact you. More than 500,000 people visited our employees’ profiles, and the majority of employees, as far as we know, did get rehired by other companies.”
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