Les licenciements s’accélèrent : que faire ?

Hello, friends. If you've noticed in the news lately, there's been an acceleration in redundancy plans. Companies and businesses are trying to lay off people like crazy. They're preparing carts. And every time we hear that Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle and Salesforce have made thousands of people homeless. It started last year, and last year it mainly concerned technology companies. Then in 2024, we're starting to see hospitals, insurance companies, bank banks and all sorts of businesses deciding to lay off people. So what's driving this? What's driving these decisions? You have to know that for years money was easy. Interest rates had fallen to practically zero at times, so that companies could go to the financial markets and raise money, take on debts. That would allow them to open new departments, new branches and pursue new ideas. Except that once they felt well in debt, they also recruited during this period of easy money. And suddenly the central banks in the United States, Europe and elsewhere decided to increase interest rates. So for these companies, they are now literally in their underwear and they find themselves on the edge of a vehicle that is heading towards them. And what do they do? Well, they are going to find a way to reduce their operating costs because they can't do anything with debt. Debt imprisons them and they are forced to finance themselves at increasing rates. So they have to find a way to reduce their costs. The adjustment variable, as is very often the case, is the employee. So they're going to take on thousands of employees and lay them off. Then they wait another quarter because their lives are structured from quarter to quarter simply because the people in there, the managers, the executives, have targets or quarterly performance objectives. So they don't see beyond the quarter. They're blind to the long term. Companies don't think long term, but quarter to quarter. The risk with that is that they'll fire people today and in a year or two they'll find themselves desperately recruiting because, well, it's a disaster. They need people. But that wouldn't be the first time. If you look at the economy today, there's a decoupling. There's a decoupling of the real economy and the financial economy. The financial economy is doing very well. If you look at the financial markets, the stock market indices, they're going up. Everything seems to be going well on the surface. But also consider when you look at the increase in the CAC40, for example. Someone sent me an image two or three days ago and said, look, you said the economy was doing badly, but the CAC 40 is actually going up. Yes, but the CAC 40 is going up a little bit, like your basket. When you go to do your stock market research, it's going up. That's the effect of inflation. It's the degradation of the value of money. So the degradation of the value of money creates inflation. And this inflation does not increase in value or bring value. When the timebox goes from €2 to €3, when the bottle of oil goes from €1.80 to €5.50, it is not that its intrinsic value has increased. It is rather the intrinsic value it has not moved. It is rather the value of money that has decreased. And it is the same for stocks. When we see stocks that take the elevator just like that, for no reason, while the fundamentals are the same or even bad, well, this stock has simply increased, like the bottle of oil or the time, it is simply inflation and it affects the indexes and everything. So it creates a financial market that appears to be good. However, the decoupling between the real and financial economies is not the first time we have seen it. We can have a financial economy that seems to be doing well, while at the same time we have a real economy that is in a disastrous situation. So today I was telling you that companies of all kinds. Last year it was technology companies, and today companies of all kinds are laying off people. And sometimes some, like Amazon for example, and others have several employees. That means that some have six or seven hours per employee. So they regularly send people to the market. And that is very difficult because for the people who are in it, there is nothing worse than being made redundant at the same time as 2,000 other colleagues. Because you enter this market and then you are in competition with thousands of colleagues looking for a job in the same field. This will have an impact on prices. This will make it difficult for those who are unfortunate enough to end up on the streets to find a job. So here's something else I can tell you today. What can you do yourself at your own level? First of all, don't give them any excuses. That means trying to do your job well. I'm not asking you to push yourself towards burnout. I'm not asking you to work weekends or nights or holidays. You won't change anything. Anyway, when they decide to fire people, they generally don't base it on performance or only very marginally. Typically, you have a vp, you have someone like that who will meet with a CEO who will say, listen, what we want to see, in your department, you have 5,000 people. What we want to see, we want to see by the end of the month or the End of the quarter, we want to see that you have fired 1,000 people. Get on with it. I know it's hard, but you can do it. You fire 1,000 people. There you go. So in this context, they're not necessarily going to take the 1000 worst performers and fire them. They're just going to take people and throw them out. But even though there have been anecdotal cases, there have been American companies that have started monitoring their employees that have started to invisibly install metrics in the background. That is to say, they've started to install metrics to see how many emails are going out, how many chats are going on, how many people are going through, hours on the phone per week and everything, how many meetings they have, how full their calendar is. Some companies have done this and then said, well, we're going to cut back in a targeted, surgical way. But don't think that it's always surgical. Always. Often it's not often being the best performer on the team can get to you and put you, your team, your manager and everyone else out on the street. So don't kill yourself at work. But look at it from another angle. Don't give them the opportunity either. Don't let your guard down. That's what I was trying to tell you. Don't let your guard down. Work, attend as many meetings as possible, send as many emails as possible, make noise, make a fuss, all that. That way, when they want to fire you based on performance, they'll go blind. They won't be able to tell who's performing well and who's not. And that might allow you to slip through the cracks. Another thing, if you've been with a company for a long time, years, stay there. Don't try to go elsewhere. Why? Because the longer you stay in a company, the more expensive it is to fire you. That means if you're fired, you're entitled to severance pay. The severance pay is proportional to the time you've spent in the company. So if you've been there for 10 years, it's not the time to change. 20, 24 is not the time to change. Stay there. Well, if you've been in your woods for six months and you feel like things are going badly and you have the opportunity to go somewhere else, go somewhere else, you have nothing to lose anyway. But if you've been there for five years, four, four years, eight years, nine years, 10 years, it doesn't matter. In that case, stay. Because if they ever decide to fire you at that point, you'll have to that he'll have to pay. So that will allow you to leave with a nice salary. A former manager of mine was fired this week from a company where they said, we're one big family. You have the type of company that tells you we've never had redundancy plans in our history. We're one big family. Even when someone's role becomes redundant, give them months in advance and we'll integrate them somewhere else and everything. It's not our style to do that kind of thing. Well, it's everyone's style. After 25 years, they let her go. When she joined this company, beer cost 50 cents, a pack of cigarettes was €1 and 20 cents. Okay, just to tell you she stayed too long. I advise people not to stay in a company for too long. However, if you're in it, it's too late. Stay there for 20, 24. Another thing, prepare your CV. If your CV is out of date, because you've probably been with a company for a while, so you haven't looked at it too much, get your CV out, prepare it, put in the right keywords, update it a little, look at the market related to your profession, see who's hiring. Because as always, even if it seems like there are waves and waves of layoffs, there are still companies that are hiring in all fields. Look for them, look for those gems. Find them. That way, if you ever have a problem, if you ever hear about a layoff next Monday, you'll be faster on the market than your colleagues. Because when you get fired, if that happens to you, they'll fire 1,000 people at the same time. So the fastest one wins. If you are faster, if you have already done a preliminary analysis of the market, if you already have a CV ready, if you already have your references ready, as soon as the news is announced to you, you are already looking. And if there is a position open within a 100km radius of your home, you will get it. Whereas if you are not ready, when you are laid off, it will break you. It will break you psychologically, it will break you technically too, it means that you are not ready. And by the time you have bounced back, gotten back into the swing of things and and had a cv, three or four weeks have already passed and your colleagues have already taken the few jobs that were available. So this should not happen to you. You have to be super, super fast. The moment you hear the news, you immediately send your applications. You are in an interview three days later. Another thing I want to tell you is that now is not the time to buy a new car. Now is not the time to use a credit card. Now is not the time to pay for a vacation on credit. Now is not the time to go on a shopping spree that you can't afford in cash. What you need to do today is to put money aside as much as possible. Start tightening your belt. Cut back on your spending, because if it ever happens to you and you get laid off, you don't want to find yourself laid off, laid off with an empty account. Once you're laid off, excuse me, you need to have enough in your account, enough money to be able to hold on, to be able to pay your bills, to maintain your standard of living for a while while you find a way to turn around. The last thing you want is to find yourself laid off. Laid off, Laid off. Because, you know, I'm thinking in English and French at the same time. So that's what creates this kind of situation. The last thing you want, as I was saying, is to lose your job. And at the same time, you don't have the funds. You have an account with €800 and you don't have any. You have dates, you have installments to pay here and there, installment for the car, installment for the holidays, installment for the tv, installment for the credit card. And at that point, your financial and personal situation can deteriorate very quickly and very easily. So be very conservative about your spending in 2024. Be really very conservative. If you have a car, even if it makes noise, even if it's rotten, keep it. Give it a good old car, keep using it. Don't go on impulse spending. Be careful with credit cards. If you can start paying them off, pay them off. This is not the time to go on extraordinary spending spree. So there you have it, my friends. I hope this doesn't happen to you. But I know that statistically, some of those who are watching this video will find themselves impacted because it's becoming very pathological now. It's accelerating. Another thing I'd like to tell you about this. Psychologically, what has unblocked companies is the Elon Musk effect. It's the Twitter effect. When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he fired 80% of the staff. And many companies were like, how is he going to run the company? Then he realized that a year later, Twitter is still going strong. So it's because he was overloaded. He was overloaded with ideological inspectors. He was overloaded with political commissars. He was overloaded with people who spent their days in Useless meetings. So some companies said to themselves, what if we did the same? There's also something else I'd like to tell you. I told you about this in my book Toxic, which is available on Amazon, on Kindle or in paperback. I told you about recruiting managers. What does that mean? It means that in my career I have seen managers recruit people who were not absolutely necessary, so they didn't really need them. But every time they talk to managers, they say, we want more bodies. Sometimes in English they say, we want bodies. It sounds pretty sinister. Or we want heads, we want head counts. We want heads, we want heads to be counted. It sounds like Isis. So these people wanted to recruit. Why? Because quite simply, the work wasn't optimized. So he had to throw more and more people at it, but also to increase their brand, their personal brand. Because a manager, the day he leaves the company, the day he goes somewhere else, he prefers to say, I manage 30 people rather than I manage four. Obviously, if he manages a large team, if he manages a team, it's because he's someone important. And so the money from the useless people he recruited didn't come out of his pocket anyway, but it left the company. So many managers, to increase their own profile, went into recruitment. But there's worse. This recruitment can be found at the level of the company itself. That is to say, many companies have recruited to show growth and attract financiers. So a company will publish and sometimes we find fake ads. I find fake company ads that say, I've told you about it in other videos that say recruiting five male and female employees, when in fact there isn't even any work. But it's a way of showing that we are creating work. So it's going very well for us. So there are idiots who don't recruit, and there are idiots who do recruit, who will therefore go and recruit people. And we end up in companies where there are too many people. It happened to me, honestly, working in companies where the reason why I was recruited, the qualifications for which I was recruited, I used them once every three weeks. And the rest of my time I was invited to meetings, meetings where I spent my time daydreaming and then drawing on, on paper, on a pad, mythical ones that served absolutely no purpose, with people who talked non stop, who invited other people, who talked nonstop. And there was no added value in what was done and the company paid for it. So somewhere, somewhere, companies also inflicted on themselves very large teams, often recruited just to flatter each other's egos and give the appearance of a company that is growing, so today it finds itself saying to itself, yeah, what if we change the way we see things? If we change the way we work? And then we fire all those who do not collaborate directly, do not directly participate in the creation of value within the company. There you have it. But hey, after all, the company is always excessive. So they went into excess in one direction and now they will leave. They are going into excess in the other direction. We will see how it ends.