I found out midday Wednesday that one of my former employers, the MSSP Deepwatch, laid off 25% of its staff, about 100 people, that day. Layoffs are a fact of life even in the security field. It happened to me back in March 2023. In this blog post, I want to share my experience with the LinkedIn green open to work banner in hopes it may help someone.
I have mixed feelings on the banner. As for Deepwatch, you’ll have to read between the lines, but I won’t make you squint too hard.
What’s good about the Linkedin green open to work banner
In the immediate aftermath of receiving notice, you need to do something. Psychologically, you need to get the ball rolling toward finding your next landing place. And I do think turning on the open to work banner and announcing that your job no longer exists and you are now in the market is a very valid and useful thing to do for that reason alone. It gets the word out to your colleagues in the field outside of your most recent employer that you are suddenly looking. You may be able to catch lightning in a bottle very quickly and get a promising lead right away. If that’s one of the first things you did after losing your job, I don’t blame you one bit.
Writing a message saying what happened is also helpful. If all you do is enable the banner, only recruiters see it. You want the people in your network to see it too.
What else to do
But it’s not the only thing I recommend you do. Another thing I did was think about possible landing places. I thought about who I knew those landing places, or who I knew that used to work at those landing places. It’s always a good idea to talk to a former employee who left about what they think of the place. When I joined the company that became Deepwatch myself, I talked to a former employee before signing my offer letter.
I’ve found that most people will talk freely and honestly about former employers. Sometimes people leave because they found a better fit or a better opportunity somewhere else, but they enjoyed working there. Sometimes it’s a good company but they just didn’t like the role or they didn’t get along as well with their supervisor as they would have liked. And none of those things are showstoppers. I talk freely and honestly about my former employers too, except for the one who won’t let me. I’m contractually obligated to say that, so let’s move on.
The layoff stigma
Let’s get one more thing out of the way. There’s a bit of a stigma about layoffs, but there shouldn’t be. It happens to almost everyone at least once in their career.
I’ve seen some statements that companies don’t want to hire people who are unemployed, that the best people never get RIF’ed. The Deepwatch layoffs prove that’s not true. One of the people impacted received kudos, by name, from the CISO of their largest customer in front of the whole company at an all-hands in 2019. I was there, and so were about 300 other people.
When a Peter Thiel disciple comes into a new company, they’re not looking at merit. They’re looking to slash payroll as much as possible and see what breaks. The move fast and break things mentality extends to laying people off too.
Smart companies that are going to stand the test of time know this. You want to work for one of those, not for someone’s get-rich-quick scheme.
When the Linkedin green open to work banner hurts
I used the green Linkedin open to work banner, but I didn’t leave it up very long. And I’ll tell you why. I had two very solid leads by 5:00 p.m. the day after I lost my job. By the end of the week, I had my first interviews scheduled.
I kept looking, and I had a few leads trickle in passively as a result of that banner. That was nice. None of them were really what I was looking for, but if you’re going to apply for a job, you might as well apply for 10. It gives you fallback options in case some of those others don’t work out. It also gives you practice tuning your resume and interviewing. Counter-intuitively, applying for jobs you’re not wild about can help increase your chances of landing the role you are excited about.
But what I found was that after about a week of that banner being visible, it became toxic. I get profile views from recruiters and random inquiries about security jobs every week when I’m not looking. When I’m not looking, that’s annoying. But when I’m looking, it’s good, it gives me options. And after a week of having the green banner on my profile, all of that dried up. Then it didn’t get any better after a second week. I was the Tesla Cyber Truck of job seekers.
I needed to do something to break the slump. Here’s what I came up with.
What I did to counteract the Linkedin banner effect
Taking down the banner is the first step. The second step is looking like you’re still employed.
I had already marked myself as no longer working for my previous employer, which was a mistake. If you haven’t done that, wait until you have your next role to do so. When asked, don’t lie. Say you were part of a reduction in force and you’re now looking. But nothing says you have to advertise it.
In my case, technically I still had a job. I’ve been a content creator since the late 1990s. My content produces revenue. You’re reading some of it right now. It’s not making me rich, but the amount doesn’t matter.
So I took down my banner and listed my current employer as The Silicon Underground. I figured it couldn’t make me any worse. Interest in me was colder than a Tesla Cyber Truck, after all.
And the experiment worked. It took a few days, but the random recruiter profile views started coming back, and the random inquiries also started coming back. If anything they accelerated, because I looked like an entrepreneur rather than a cubicle dweller, and therefore maybe a little bit more of a challenge to pry loose. I got a fair number of queries simply asking if I was available for cyber security roles.
The opening I wanted was a job at Tenable. And even though the interviews all went really well, I kept looking and applying until I received the offer letter. Somewhere along the way I found out I was up against about a hundred other applicants, so I needed to have a contingency plan. Hacking the green banner was part of that contingency plan.
How to emulate what I did
So if you are using the green banner successfully, I’m happy for you. But in the event that the green banner stops working for you the way it stopped working for me, consider taking that down, and consider playing yourself off as a freelance consultant. I’m sure you have done some after hours security work in the past. So add a current employer going back as far as you can remember where you did miscellaneous computer security consulting. Even something as simple as cleaning viruses off your neighbors’ computers counts.
I hope this advice about green banner hacking helps you get a few more leads toward finding your next role.
Disclaimer: This blog post was neither endorsed by nor approved by my current employer, Tenable. Opinions expressed here are solely my own.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.