My Cybersecurity Layoff Journey

I've been wanting to create this blog post for quite a while now and the day has finally come. I am going to talk about my cybersecurity layoff journey. After 436 days and 1352 applications, I finally obtained gainful employment. My inspiration behind publishing this post is to help others out there who have been either laid off for the first time, or have already been laid off before but haven't experienced a job market that is oversaturated and requires new skills to adapt to have a good chance at landing at least an interview. I say at least landing an interview because getting an offer is extremely difficult right now. I know the point in interviewing is to get extended an offer, but you can't get an offer if you can't land an interview. That is the point I want to make, and will be a major focus throughout this post. I am going to talk about what didn't work first, then gradually go into detail the strategies I used to adapt to this new job market and what helped me land interviews. You'll see everything from the point of view of someone who had been laid off for the first time. The ups and downs a job loss entails is also worth mentioning as not everything should be seen as negative. At the end of this post, you'll have a better understanding of what steps to take to navigate your layoff journey so that you are making the best use of your time, as well as taking good care of yourself in this challenging process.

The Dreaded Calendar Invite

It was a Monday morning September 30, 2024. Like with every work week, I fully looked forward to starting the new week! I opened my laptop and signed in to my work email. Right away I noticed that I had lost access to various email groups I had been a part of. I opened Microsoft Teams, and I saw the same thing. I no longer had access to various teams I was part of. I also reached out to two of my coworkers explaining to them what happened, but none of them responded. There were two emails in my inbox that caught my attention. One was a calendar invite for a meeting with the CISO and someone from HR. The other email was confirming my attendance ASAP for the actual meeting. I never had a Monday morning meeting before, so this was clearly something that indicated that I was going to be laid off. Before all of this, the company was already in a downward spiral post merger. When a company goes through an acquisition or a merger, from what I have seen and heard from others is that 99% of the time there will be layoffs. I accepted the calendar invite and confirmed my attendance in a separate email.

The Meeting

I joined the meeting and right away I was greeted first by the CISO who basically gave me a scripted explanation of what was going to happen. Later, the HR person also gave me a scripted explanation and asked at the end if I had any questions. That was it, the meeting lasted about 5 minutes. As part of my severance agreement, I was given a month of my salary and allowed to keep the company laptop. Once the meeting had ended, someone from IT reached out and asked me to give them the green light for the laptop to be wiped. This to me was a bit strange that I was given some time to basically do what exactly? I was already told to cease any work related activities, so why was I given some time in which another disgruntled employee could have caused damages to the company by stealing proprietary information. There was no DLP or Data Loss Prevention in place, so anyone could have used this time to steal company information. Eventually the laptop was wiped, and that was all. I closed my laptop, and began to process everything. I took some time to relax and close my eyes in my bed, and afterwards went to the gym several hours later. Before this, I took a picture from my window of the beautiful sky that day.

Next Steps

The next day, I began to contact my references and turned on my green open to work banner on LinkedIn. There are a lot of people out there that will tell you to take a week off to disconnect completely as a sudden job loss can hit hard. However, my initial reaction when I got laid off was that I was not surprised at all and was expecting it because 100 US based employees at the start of the month had been laid off. So it was only a matter of time that my role was also going to be impacted. I contacted the previous CISO who had worked for the company pre merger and post merger, and the advice I was given was to network as much as possible, as well as try to reach out to hiring managers directly. I checked for security engineer openings at my reference's company, but they were also offshored. There were no US based security engineer openings. The other references I contacted were only aware of what was going on in the job market of their home country, so it would not be viable as their company only hired people that were based in the home country. In addition to contacting my references, I also updated my LinkedIn profile to reflect all the achievements that I worked on, which I put the ones where I felt I had a much higher impact/visibility on my resume. Once I did all of this, I set up a job alert on LinkedIn to be notified via email of any security engineer jobs that fit my preferences which at the time was set to remote only. Lastly, I began applying to jobs through spraying and praying. I read the job description carefully, and if I matched 50% of the requirements, I would apply. This would later down the road prove to be ineffective.

Refining the Strategy Early On

I began to land interviews but the response rate was abysmal. I was getting a lot of more rejections. Something had to change, not completely but instead I needed to refine my strategy. My initial strategy to apply to jobs was the same strategy I used during the 2022 job hunt. Some things were working, but it felt like I was not making progress or better yet not making the best use out of my time. The period from October to December 2024, was also marked with a lot of uncertainty because there was the US presidential election in November. Many companies began to conduct hiring freezes, and many others began doing their usual end of year layoffs. With the election out of the way, the public sector was hit hard with more than 317,000 federal employees leaving the government in 2025 out of which there were layoffs due to DOGE in the first half of the year. The added competition from former public sector employees looking to transition to the private sector made things a lot more challenging for everyone. Seeing all of this occurring, I also started to come across more and more people on LinkedIn who were also having a tough time landing interviews, and of course people asking for help because they were laid off. These were people with a solid background, who even with experience in FAANG companies were struggling to just land an interview. I was worried, but remained focused. I made sure to tell myself to not focus so much on what I don't have control over, and instead focus on what I can control. Some simple changes I made right away was to expand my search. So now I began to search for roles nationwide, and also included hybrid and fully onsite 5 days a week roles. I also searched across LinkedIn with a search titled "hiring security engineer" so that I could see anyone across LinkedIn posting about hiring for a security engineer. I set a filter to reflect any posts within the past 24 hours.

Lastly, I began to use other job boards like Built In and RemoteYeah. I had success in landing interviews with both job boards, but I was not getting any offers. So I continued to refine my strategy early on.

Weeding Out Through The Noise

As the year progressed and more and more layoffs occurring across all industries, there would be more candidates to compete with. The market became oversaturated, so I had to also evolve with this changing job market. I began to outreach to hiring managers through their hiring posts, and if I was unable to find the hiring manager for the role, I would outreach to the recruiter instead. The priority should always be the hiring manager, but some hiring managers are not as active on LinkedIn, and some prefer to not interact with someone on LinkedIn that has not been selected yet to be interviewed. In other words, some hiring managers are by the books and will not respond to you outside of the formal interviewing process. If you do happen to successfully interact with a hiring manager on LinkedIn, that is great! Make sure to send them a connect request, and make sure you do your due diligence. Review their LinkedIn profile and see what kind of challenges the team may be facing and or the company as a whole. You already did something that not a lot of people are doing, and a decision maker already knows your name. So you have not just increased your visibility, but also bypassed a lot of noise from the candidate pool! Remember that the job market is oversaturated, some roles are receiving hundreds and even thousands of applicants. There was one role that I had applied to that received 1600 applicants because someone I knew at the company told me. I even had filled out my application listing this person's name to get an interview, and that still did not work.

In addition to connecting with hiring managers, send connection requests to functional experts or the people that do your job. I managed to land an interview this way, and gained insight into the hiring process before speaking to a recruiter. Some other things I did was making sure I was staying up to date on the job market. I wanted to get the point of view of others who were also going through the same as me. I began to watch A Life After Layoff on YouTube, and also would occasionally browse the r/Layoffs subreddit. Just be careful to not doom scroll on the subreddit and even on LinkedIn. The focus here is to be informed and to keep networking and applying and staying motivated as much as possible.

Taking Good Care of Yourself

Not everyone may consider this part important, but I consider it to be the most important of them all. The layoff journey is exhausting, and you will get burnt out fairly quickly if you don't take good care of yourself. What do I mean when I say take good care of yourself? Taking good care of yourself is more than just getting 8 hours of sleep a day and eating healthy. For me, it's taking the steps necessary to focus on other things that make me feel happy as well as energized! This will vary from person to person, but for me it involves regularly exercising and not seeing any screens. Going out for a walk especially with a family member or friend will help greatly! When I got laid off, I was in Colombia spending time with my family and enjoying the varied landscape. I had bought a car, so it made traveling a lot easier. The other good thing about working remotely in another country that you hold citizenship for is the opportunity to save up $. Not only that, but I also speak the main language which is Spanish, and also there are no harsh winter seasons like the ones we have here in the states. So there are more hours of daylight and more fun activities to do outside. When you have a healthy mind, you're able to see things more clearly. You're able to quickly recover from exhaustion and remain motivated in continuing to pursue what you are trying to pursue. Now fully recovered, I continued the job search!

Rejection Is Redirection

Along the way, I managed to make it to several final rounds of interviews only to be rejected at the very end. This to me was the most hard hitting experience because you were very close in getting extended an offer. Also, if you're like me you had your hopes high because of everything you did to get to this point. It's not something that anyone can easily just do in being selected for an interview, preparing for the interview, preparing for the next several rounds of interviews, all while staying optimistic in a job market that is depressing and brutal for everyone. Some final rounds led to solid feedback, while others I was never given any due to company policy. So at times I was left wondering, what did I do wrong? That was the first thought that came to my head. After giving some thought, I told myself that I was not doing anything wrong at all. Every company out there has different expectations of how hiring should be done, but the main problem I see recurring is that those hiring expectations are often unrealistic or not communicated effectively to the recruiter as to what the hiring manager wants. There are a lot of companies out there looking to hire unicorns or people with picture perfect experience in multiple domains only to severely underpay them. As soon as I realized more and more companies were doing this, I became just as selective as what these companies were doing with everyone. Lastly, I also had to refine my strategy in ensuring that I was applying to roles in which I met 80% of the requirements instead of the 50% like before, making sure I met some of the bonus or preferred qualifications as well. I also made sure to NOT use LinkedIn Easy Apply or apply to jobs that already had more than 100 applicants within 24 hours. The role had to be posted within 24-48 hours with less than 100 applicants for me to apply. In summary, every rejection was simply a redirection to something better. If I had a positive mindset, good things would be attracted. So I kept my head up and continued pushing through.

An Early Christmas Gift

December came and the first thing that came to my head was that the job market was going to continue to get worse and slow down. During this time, I had been working with a career coach for two months. Some of the strategies that I was told to do I was already doing. We worked out an agenda in the introduction session, and I was also provided to use trackers on Notion for the people I had sent connect requests to as well as the jobs I had applied to. Lastly, several assignments were left to be completed which consisted of meeting goals like sending 50-100 connect requests a week on LinkedIn, and also following up on those requests. It was something that I had never done before, and wanted to give it a try especially after my parents supported me in making the decision to enroll in a career coaching program. It helped me gain clarity and see some blind spots I wouldn't have caught on my own. It's not magic, but it helped greatly in my situation in which I lacked a strong reliable network. On December 10, I received a phone call from a recruiter asking me if I could start on a certain date. I had just received a verbal offer, and I thanked the recruiter and asked to send me the offer in writing as the salary was a bit low. I tried negotiating, but the salary was a hard figure. So I reviewed the written offer letter and signed right away. The timing the offer came through is something that I will never forget. Two weeks before Christmas, God provided me with a gift in which I was working hard to obtain for a year and 2 months. So many days where I felt miserable, burnt out, and questioning myself when would I be employed again? I saw others celebrating their new roles on LinkedIn surpassingly in December, so something deep down inside me told me that my time was coming. That time eventually came, and I am very grateful for everyone that supported me. People who sent me messages to brighten up my day, others who thought about me and told me to apply at their companies they work for, and for everyone else who showed up for me. Being my first layoff, I had to figure out a lot of things on my own. Nobody in my family had been laid off before, so I couldn't just go up to someone and ask them for advice on how to navigate a layoff. That is why I saw this layoff journey as an experience. An experience to continue building my network, continue to build my brand through content creation helping others learn more about cybersecurity, and also building on the side. I don't want to be this vulnerable again. I want to have more control next time because a layoff can happen to anyone. I want to continue to use my resilience and hard work in making smarter decisions for the long term success of my career, so that I can have stability and freedom.