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Laid off: what to do in the first two weeks

Paperwork, runway and ten messages come before the resume. The week-one checklist including PF, gratuity and full-and-final, and the two things people get wrong immediately.

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In the first week: get the paperwork in writing, work out how many months of runway you have, file for anything you are owed, and tell about ten people. The resume comes after those, and it is not urgent for a fortnight.

Being laid off is not a performance event and it is extremely common. The order below is about money and time, because those are the two things that constrain every decision you make over the next three months.

Week one

  1. Get the terms in writing. Last working day, severance amount and date, notice pay, unused leave encashment, when equity vesting stops, how long you keep health cover, whether you may keep the laptop. Verbal terms in a layoff conversation get remembered differently by both sides.
  2. Do not sign on the spot. Severance agreements often carry a non-disparagement or non-compete clause and sometimes a release of claims. You are almost always allowed to take it away and read it. If the numbers are large or the clauses are broad, an hour of a lawyer’s time is cheap here.
  3. Save what is yours before access is cut. Personal files, your payslips, your appraisal documents, your reference contacts’ personal emails, and a copy of your own job description. Not company data — taking that turns a layoff into a legal problem.
  4. File for what you are owed. Unemployment benefit where it exists; in India, the PF withdrawal or transfer, gratuity if you have completed the qualifying service, and your full-and-final settlement in writing.
  5. Work out your runway. Cash divided by monthly essentials. Get the number, and get it precisely — a vague sense of “a few months” produces both panic and complacency. Then cut the top two discretionary expenses today rather than in month three.
  6. Tell about ten people. Former managers, close ex-colleagues, the two or three people who owe you a favour. A short, plain message. This is the single highest-yield hour of the whole week, and it is the one people put off longest.

Week two

  • Take a few days off first. Not a platitude — interviews taken in the first raw week go badly and they burn the companies you most wanted. Runway permitting, start on day eight.
  • Update the resume, then LinkedIn. The resume forces you to decide what you did; the profile is easier once that is settled.
  • Decide what you are looking for before you start applying. Same role, adjacent role, different industry, contract. This decides which resume you write, and rewriting it in week five because you changed your mind costs more than deciding now.
  • Set a weekly rhythm. A job search with no structure expands to fill every waking hour and produces less. A fixed block each morning, and the afternoon is yours.

The two things people get wrong

Applying to two hundred jobs in week one. Volume feels like control. It is the lowest-yield channel there is, and doing it with a resume you have not updated properly wastes the postings you most wanted. Referrals convert at many times the rate of the apply button, and there are only so many people to ask.

Hiding it. A layoff is public information at most companies and it is not a mark against you in 2026. Saying it plainly — on LinkedIn, to your network, in interviews — is both easier and more effective than constructing a story. How to say it is its own post.

On the resume itself

You do not write “laid off” on a resume. Dates carry it, and an end date that is last month with no explanation is completely ordinary. If the gap runs long enough to be noticed later, one line handles it.

What is worth doing while it is fresh: write down what you actually achieved in that job, with numbers, this week. Six months from now you will not remember the figures, and the people who could have told you will have moved on too.

Where this site fits

GetFinalCV is a paid product and this is a bad week to be sold to, so plainly: the checker is free and needs no account, and it will tell you whether the resume you already have extracts cleanly. If it does, keep it. You only need a builder if you are rebuilding the document anyway.

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