How Layoffs Affect Employer Brand: Analysis of 13 Layoff Events, 2022–2026

When companies initiate layoffs, employer reviews begin to incorporate criticisms of more than just job security.

Layoffs are among the most visible actions a company can take, and their financial and workforce implications are well established (e.g., De Meuse & Dai, 2013; Quinlan & Bohle, 2009). Less is known, however, about how they affect employer brand, specifically which areas and for how long.

To that end, we considered 13 layoff events across six major employers, examining employer reviews from Glassdoor and Indeed between Q3 2022 and Q2 2026. Employing a difference-in-differences design, where each company with a major layoff event was compared to a matched control set of companies with little or no layoff activity in the same period, we found that reductions in positive sentiment extended beyond job stability.

Management & Organization — one of our 16 attributes of employer brand that covers leadership, communication, decision-making and organizational structure — was discussed less positively in the quarter where a layoff event was announced and the three that followed, with positive sentiment falling on average by roughly 4 to 6 percentage points. There was no sign of meaningful recovery within the window that we could observe.

Our analysis produced two additional findings: the decline tended to begin before an announcement was made public, and layoff size showed little relationship to how much sentiment moved.

Below we take these findings in turn, and end with what they suggest for employers planning layoffs.

The damage extends beyond job security and stability

Prior research suggests a connection between layoff events and employer brand (Campos-García & Zúñiga-Vicente, 2018), though to our knowledge there has been limited investigation into which specific aspects are affected, or for how long. As employer brand becomes increasingly important for assessing reputational health and informing talent attraction, understanding which areas are affected by events such as layoffs can inform mitigation strategies. Our employer brand framework separates employee commentary into 16 attributes, allowing us to investigate at this level.

To that end, we designated our employer brand attribute Management & Organization as the primary outcome because it captures topics related to how layoffs are conducted rather than their consequences for job security, covering areas such as communication, decision-making and leadership. Two secondary outcomes, Team & People and Mission & Purpose, were also examined, on the grounds that layoffs affect team composition and workload in the former, and perceptions of how employees are valued in the latter. Our outcomes throughout are the proportion of commentary about a given attribute that was positive, measured per company-quarter.

We restricted our investigation to reviews from the online employment platforms Glassdoor and Indeed. Our interest is in how employees describe their own experience of a layoff, for which first-hand reviews are an appropriate instrument, and both platforms offered a consistent source of such commentary across companies and over time.

For our analysis, each estimate compared a company announcing layoffs affecting more than 1% of headcount against every other company in our panel that had no layoff above 0.5% of headcount within two quarters either side of that announcement. This produced between 8 and 11 comparison companies per event, and the composition of that set varies by event, since a company serving as a comparison for one announcement may itself be excluded around another. Comparing against contemporaneous, undisturbed employers allowed us to link changes in our specified outcomes to the announcement rather than to the market. The tech sector in early 2023, for example, was deeply affected by large-scale layoff events, such that a simple before-and-after comparison would have credited a company-specific layoff with damage that was industry-wide.

Our results showed that, on average, positive commentary about Management & Organization fell by about 4 percentage points in the announcement quarter and roughly 6 by two quarters out, where it stayed. With our dataset ending in Q2 2026, we were unable to follow the most recent events for the full post-announcement window of three quarters. However, of the 10 events we could follow fully for two quarters, all showed a decline in positive sentiment, as did every one of the nine we could follow for three quarters. Among the companies in our panel not undergoing a layoff, quarter-to-quarter movement on this attribute typically ran between 1 and 5 percentage points in either direction, with a median of around 2, such that a 6-point decline sustained across consecutive quarters sits well outside that pattern.

Our secondary outcomes did not follow. Team & People showed no measurable change at any point in the window, and Mission & Purpose was too weakly represented in the employer review data for our estimates to be interpretable.

To test whether any one announcement was carrying these results, we removed each event in turn and recalculated. At two quarters out, the estimate stayed between −5.6 and −6.2 percentage points across all 10 recalculations, remaining at −5.4 with one company’s four events excluded entirely. The movement we observed does not appear then to be a product of any single company that we analyzed.

Beyond a movement in sentiment, it is worth noting that the actual share of the conversation devoted to Management & Organization did not move. This attribute occupied about the same proportion of overall employee commentary after a layoff announcement as before it, suggesting that employees were not talking about decision-making, leadership, or organizational structure more relative to other areas of employer brand, but rather they were talking about it less favorably. A change in tone at a steady share of conversation suggests the same conversation, but conducted more critically.

The decline begins before the announcement

In the quarter before a major layoff was made public, the share of positive commentary about Management & Organization had already fallen by around 2 percentage points relative to comparable employers without layoff events. Ten of the 13 events showed a decline in that quarter, and the pattern held when considering only the direction of movement rather than its size.

This trajectory appears to be a gradual decline rather than an abrupt one: a fall of around 2 percentage points before the announcement, 4 in the announcement quarter itself, and 6 by two quarters out, with no meaningful recovery within the window we could observe. Instead of solely a reaction to the announcement, a decline beginning a quarter before suggests an earlier shift in how employees were assessing Management & Organization.

This pre-announcement decline complicates the design as much as it adds to our findings. A difference-in-differences approach assumes that, absent the layoff, companies impacted heavily by the event would move as their comparison companies did. Sentiment diverging a quarter early may mean either that employees were responding to information before the announcement was made public, or that these companies were already on a different trajectory for unconnected reasons.

The pattern we have observed is more consistent with the first reading. The divergence appears one quarter before the announcement rather than building across the window, accelerating sharply at the announcement itself. It is unlikely a company in gradual decline would show this kind of pattern. The second reading cannot be ruled out, however, and to the extent it holds, our post-announcement estimates will include some portion of a pre-existing trend. The estimate is also sensitive to sample composition: one company accounts for four of the 13 events we analyzed, and excluding those events reduces the pre-announcement decline from around 2 percentage points to roughly 1, at which point it is no longer distinguishable from ordinary variation.

The pre-announcement decline has a second consequence, for the period we treat as representative. An initial specification anchored the baseline to the two quarters immediately preceding each announcement, which understated the effect. Setting the baseline a quarter earlier, so that the reference period preceded any observed deterioration, increased the estimated decline at announcement from roughly 3.2 to 4.3 percentage points. Under that earlier specification, the anticipation effect was absorbed into the baseline and could not have been detected. The choice of reference period matters most close to the announcement: by two quarters out, the two specifications differed by less than 0.2 percentage points.

For employers, timing rather than magnitude appears the more immediate concern. Our findings suggest employees may begin forming and expressing a view before an announcement is made public. Whether the effect is as large as our full-sample estimate indicates is uncertain, but planning that treats the announcement as the start of the conversation risks arriving late.

Ruling out a general shift in sentiment

We also considered the possibility that employees writing reviews in the aftermath of a layoff may simply express more negative sentiment in general. If post-announcement commentary were uniformly less favorable, simply examining all of the employer brand would identify the area exhibiting the largest movement, rather than one genuinely responsive to layoff events.

To test this, we designated three attributes in advance as controls: Remuneration, Learning & Development, and Innovation & Technology, none of which we expected to respond to layoff announcements. Pay bands are set by compensation cycles rather than headcount decisions; and training programs and technical infrastructure do not change rapidly enough within a quarter of an announcement. If these attributes moved alongside Management & Organization, we would have measured a general shift in tone rather than the specific effect we observed.

Our findings indicate that two of the three controls did not move. Remuneration and Learning & Development showed no change at any point in the window that could be distinguished from ordinary variation: the direction of movement varied from quarter to quarter rather than settling consistently in either direction, with both drifting slightly positive around the announcement itself. By comparison, Management & Organization declined for every one of the 10 events we could follow for two quarters after announcement.

We note that our third control, Innovation & Technology, instead declined around 6 percentage points at one and two quarters after the announcement, with confidence intervals that exclude zero. Our sample composition may offer one explanation for this pattern. Eleven of the 13 events occurred at technology companies, which make up five of the 14 employers we examined. This concentration resulted from the announcements that met our severity threshold rather than from any selection on our part. In a sample weighted this way, a layoff may plausibly affect perceptions of technical capability through canceled projects and reduced team capacity, in which case Innovation & Technology would not be a valid control.

We are nonetheless cautious about treating this movement as a genuine effect, for three reasons. For one, the estimates are roughly three times less precise than those for Management & Organization, so the range of values consistent with our data is wide. Additionally, a Wilcoxon signed-rank test, which asks simply whether most events moved in the same direction rather than averaging their magnitudes, was non-significant. Lastly, the trajectory is less consistent than that of Management & Organization, showing no movement in the announcement quarter, a sharp drop at one and two quarters post-announcement, and then partial recovery at three. Whether layoffs genuinely affect perceptions of technical capability is a question for a study including a larger sample than ours.

How the broader employer brand reacts

In addition to a specific area of employer brand, we also computed an overall score across all 16 attributes, using the same calculation as our Employer Brand Index (EBI) but again restricted to Glassdoor and Indeed reviews. Similar to our published EBI, the resulting measurement captures the sentiment around the employer brand as a whole.

Our results indicate this score declined by around 2 percentage points at one and two quarters after the announcement, remaining roughly 1.6 points down at three quarters post-announcement. Nine of the 10 events we could follow two quarters out showed a decline. Compared to Management & Organization, this composite score moved roughly a third as much, falling by 2.3 percentage points compared to 6 for Management & Organization over the same period.

When examining the entire employer brand as a composite, the decline in Management & Organization is compressed by the breadth of the average. A company tracking only the composite would register modest movement, with no indication that one dimension of its brand had fallen three times as far.

Severity of event explained less than expected

The effect we describe is an average across 13 events, but the individual events vary considerably. At three quarters out, declines ranged from around 14 percentage points to just over 2, with every event we could follow that far declining.

Our results suggest that the scale of the layoff event does not explain this type of range. In the announcement quarter, the two largest announcements in our sample — affecting 10.5% and 14.9% of headcount — produced declines of 12.2 and 2.9 percentage points respectively, while an announcement affecting 2.8% of headcount produced a decline of 10.0. Across the window, the association between severity and effect size was not statistically distinguishable from zero at any point.

Two events ran counter to this pattern, and both share a feature the others do not. Positive sentiment rose rather than fell in the announcement quarter for two company-quarters both affecting under 2% of headcount, each combining several smaller announcements made within weeks of one another rather than a single reduction. Because our design treats these identically, we cannot establish whether a series of modest announcements registers differently from one larger one.

Another case points in a similar direction. Rather than an immediate reduction, one event in our dataset reflects the announcement of a multi-year restructuring program affecting roughly 6% of its headcount. Despite being among the larger reductions in our sample, it produced almost no change in the announcement quarter and remained among the mildest effects two quarters later.

Prior work has found that employee responses to a downsizing announcement are shaped by its content, context, and scale (Schulz & Johann, 2018). The specific aforementioned cases highlight the manner of announcement rather than size: a reduction delivered in installments, or presented as a program extending over years, may not register in the same way as a single immediate cut. Our results speak to content and context rather than scale, as we found no relationship between the size of a reduction and the size of the decline.

Three cases are insufficient to establish if the way layoffs are executed shapes the response, and we did not code our events for how announcements were delivered. With 13 events, we also cannot rule out a size relationship too weak to detect at this sample size.

Implications for employers planning a layoff

Taken together, our results point employers — employer brand teams in particular — toward two major considerations when implementing layoffs.

1. Concerns extend beyond job security. Our findings suggest that layoff planning focused solely on stability and security may miss addressing other conversation areas that are negatively impacted, specifically organizational communication, decision-making, leadership, and structure. The damage appears to last well beyond announcement dates, such that mitigation strategies may be needed across several quarters.
2. The conversation online may begin before a public announcement. Our findings indicate that positive sentiment about Management & Organization had already fallen by around 2 percentage points in the quarter before an announcement was made public. Communication planning that treats the announcement as the starting point may mistime intervention, as employees might have already begun forming and expressing a view. Though the least robust of our findings, the direction of the effect was consistent across most events in the full sample, such that treating the announcement as the start of the conversation risks responding late.

These findings suggest that a layoff is a period during which perceptions of the organization itself are being revised. The period may not only begin before the announcement, but continue well after it. Employer brand teams may therefore need to treat the surrounding quarters as the unit of intervention rather than the announcement itself.

The actual content of those interventions, however, requires further research. Variation across the layoff events we observed was substantial, and the severity of the event accounted for little of it. One case produced a markedly smaller effect than its scale would suggest, consistent with prior work on how framing shapes the response. Other likely sources of that variation sit outside what we measured, chief among them how companies communicated internally, which is absent from our data entirely. Glassdoor’s own analysis has also found that a second round of layoffs has roughly twice the impact on reviews from current employees in the months that follow (Martin, 2025). Our design cannot address this, as we treated each company-quarter as a single event and did not examine whether earlier layoffs at the same company shaped later responses. What distinguishes an announcement that damages an employer brand from one that does not remains an open question, and answering it would require investigating how each was framed and communicated.

Method notes

Sample

Our panel comprises 14 employers across technology, pharmaceuticals, consumer goods, retail and telecoms, six of which generated the severe layoff events we investigated. The 13 qualifying events are concentrated among technology employers, which account for 11 of the 13. Findings should therefore be read as holding most confidently for large technology employers, though the comparison set draws on all five sectors. Two further companies were considered for the panel but excluded due to insufficient review volume over the time period of interest.

Identifying events

We cataloged every publicly reported layoff at these companies between Q3 2022 and Q2 2026, recording the announcement date, headcount affected, and workforce size at the time. Events were treated at the company-quarter level: where a company made multiple announcements within the same quarter, these were combined and severity computed on the total. Eight of our 13 events comprise more than one announcement, so our event count will not match a public layoff tracker directly.

Fourteen company-quarters initially met our 1% severity threshold. However, one in Q4 2022 fell too close to the start of our data to establish a pre-announcement baseline and was excluded.

Window and coverage

Each event was examined from three quarters before the announcement to three quarters after. Because our data covers a fixed period, events near either end have shorter windows: the number of events contributing to each estimate ranges from 9 to 13, and is reported alongside each chart.

Measurement

Our outcome is the share of attribute mentions that were positive, computed per company-quarter. Company-quarter-attribute cells with fewer than 30 mentions were excluded as too small to estimate a proportion reliably; this removed no observations from our primary outcome.

Estimation

For each event we computed the difference between the treated company’s change from baseline and the average change across its matched controls, giving one estimate per event. Reported figures are the mean of those estimates, with 95% confidence intervals derived from their variation across events. A Wilcoxon signed-rank test was run alongside each estimate as a check that results were not driven by a small number of large movements.

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References

• Campos-García, I., & Zúñiga-Vicente, J. Á. (2018). Downsizing and Employer Branding: Is there a Relationship? In Human Resource Planning for the 21st Century. InTech. https://doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.75402
• De Meuse, K. P., & Dai, G. (2013). Organizational downsizing: Its effect on financial performance over time. Journal of Managerial Issues, 324–344.
• Martin, C. (2025, September 16). Layoffs cast a long shadow. Glassdoor Economic Research. https://www.glassdoor.com/blog/layoffs-cast-a-long-shadow/
• Quinlan, M., & Bohle, P. (2009). Overstretched and unreciprocated commitment: reviewing research on the occupational health and safety effects of downsizing and job insecurity. International Journal of Health Services, 39(1), 1–44.
• Schulz, A. C., & Johann, S. (2018). Downsizing and the fragility of corporate reputation: An analysis of the impact of contextual factors. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 34(1), 40–50.