As Layoffs Climb, More Professionals Are Building Audiences Their Employers Can't Take Away

On September 14, Oracle employees got an early-morning email telling them that day was their last. Their system access was cut within minutes. It was the company's second round this year handled that way, after a March round in which termination emails arrived at 6 a.m. with no warning.

When access goes, so does most of the record of what that person did there. More professionals have started planning for that. They are doing what B2B brands did when search and social reach began to fall, and building audiences they own.

LinkedIn says CEO posting on the platform rose 52% over the past two years, and video creation grew 27% in 2025. Platform numbers have many causes, and nobody tracks why a given person starts posting. But the rise lines up with a layoff year on pace to rival 2023, the worst since the pandemic.

Layoffs have become a standing line item

The Skillsyncer tracker counted 225,122 tech workers laid off between January 1 and September 25, more than the 205,773 it recorded for all of 2025. Challenger, Gray & Christmas puts the year on pace for about 370,000. TrueUp's count is lower, at 190,077, though it also shows 2026 running ahead of last year.

Most of the cuts are at companies that are doing well. Cisco announced nearly 4,000 cuts in May in the same report that showed record quarterly revenue of $15.8 billion. Meta let 8,000 people go in a quarter when revenue grew 33%. Oracle's annual SEC filing says AI adoption has reduced its workforce, which went from about 162,000 to 141,000.

Marketing and sales teams have been hit as well. Salesforce's February cuts included marketing roles, and most of Microsoft's 4,800 July cuts were in sales. Gartner expects AI to eliminate entry-level marketing jobs at most high-performing teams by 2030.

Finding the next job is taking longer. Tech-sector unemployment reached 5.8% early this year, its highest level since 2001 and 2002. The median search for a new role now runs 4.7 months, compared with 3.2 months in 2024.

The reputation stays with the company

Most of what a person is known for at work stays at work. Colleagues know who fixed the billing migration or rescued a launch, and that reputation decides who gets the next hard project. That record sits in internal tools and in the memory of coworkers, some of whom are cut in the same round.

When access is shut off, none of it comes along. A hiring manager at another company has no way to see it, and neither does a recruiter searching for someone with that experience. With searches stretching past four months, that gap gets expensive.

Public writing closes some of it. A few years of posts or a newsletter about a specific problem gives the next employer something to read before the first call. State of Brand has reported that companies now evaluate comms candidates partly on their own LinkedIn presence, and that AI search tools cite named practitioners more readily than company pages.

It is the same shift State of Brand has tracked on the company side, where B2B brands are moving from renting attention to owning it. A newsletter or a steady body of posts is owned media for one person. The writer keeps it after changing jobs.

Volume doesn't build the audience

Posting more often rarely helps on its own. Readers have gotten good at spotting generic, AI-polished thought leadership, and LinkedIn now limits the reach of posts users flag as low quality. The writing that builds a reputation tends to be specific to the person's work, including what went wrong and what they'd do differently.

The platform matters too. LinkedIn's organic reach has been tilting toward paid distribution, so a following there can shrink without the writer doing anything differently. An email list the writer controls is a steadier base.

What this asks of marketing leaders

Some companies still treat employees with big audiences as a retention risk, since the following leaves when they do. That view is harder to defend in a year when the same companies are cutting staff by email at dawn. Employees can see that tenure isn't guaranteed, and asking them to keep their professional reputation entirely inside the company is a hard sell.

Companies that support employees writing in public get something out of it as well. Buyers and AI search tools both lean on named, credible people in a category, and a company with several of them is easier to find. And people who got help building a name are more likely to speak well of the company that helped, even after they leave.

For marketing leaders, the people on their teams are already building owned media. Companies that help them will have more credible voices connected to their name. Companies that discourage it will see the same audiences grow on employees' own time, with no link back to the company.