Ten months into a job at Ingeus, my 1:1s started getting shorter. Then cancelled. Then they just stopped getting rescheduled.
Nobody said anything. That silence was the loudest thing in the room.
Ingeus fired me. Other times, companies retrenched me. Different word, same door. Six times total, someone decided my role, or my presence, wasn’t going to be part of what came next.
You’d think by job loss three or four I’d see it coming from a mile away. I didn’t. Not really, until I started paying attention to the shape of the silence instead of waiting for the announcement.
Here’s the part that makes it worse. I’ve also spent 11 years inside recruitment. I’ve sat across the table from hundreds of people after their retrenchment, talented, experienced, mid-career, blindsided. And almost every time, when we talked through the months before, the signals had been there. Nobody had named them.
These days I also run layoffsg.com, a layoff tracker, crowdsourced from mainstream media and from people going through this right now. So I’ve now seen this shape from three angles: the guy getting let go, the guy who’s read hundreds of these stories after the fact, and the guy keeping the spreadsheet.
Two things worth understanding before the list.
The people who know aren’t allowed to tell you. Not malice, legal and commercial reality. Once a decision is seriously on the table, there’s disclosure sequencing, flight risk, information leaks to manage. So the people who know behave slightly differently. Not dramatically. Just slightly. That slight difference is the signal.
It’s structural, not personal, even when it feels completely personal. Companies retrench roles, not people. Your manager may have found out a week before you did. They may genuinely like you and the work you do. None of that changes the org chart decision made two levels above them.
So you’re not looking for signs your boss dislikes you. You’re looking for signs your function, your level, or your cost, is on the wrong side of a shape the company is already changing into.
The hiring freeze. Roles vanish from the portal. A colleague leaves, and nobody talks backfill. On its own, it could be nothing; budget cycles happen. Stacked with anything else on this list, it’s a company that’s already decided on its cost base.
Consultants arrive. Not the growth-project kind. The org design, span of control, headcount benchmarking kind. If you don’t know exactly what they’ve been engaged to do, that’s worth finding out.
Communication gets careful. Town halls go from specifics to principles. “Transformation,” “fit for purpose,” “evolving our structure” start replacing actual numbers. If leadership suddenly sounds like they’re reading off a holding statement, they may be holding something.
Your manager changes. Fewer 1:1s. Shorter ones. Evasive answers about your future, your next project, your visibility upstairs. This is the Ingeus one for me. I’ve heard the same line from other people more times than I can count: “Looking back, he stopped fighting for me about three months before I was told.” That three-month gap is the whole reason this list exists.
You’re asked to document everything. Your workflow, your systems, the stuff that only lives in your head. Could genuinely be reducing key-person risk. Could be reducing key-person risk in preparation for the key person leaving. Both can be true at once.
Budget disappears. Travel freezes. Training gets denied. Expenses that used to clear now need two approvals. Companies tighten before they cut. The tightening is the signal.
Your scope shrinks. Projects reassigned. Meetings you used to be in, you’re not. This is the one people rationalise hardest. “They probably just needed someone with more capacity.” Maybe. It’s also how the case for removing a role gets built, one small handover at a time. Pay attention to what’s being taken away, not just what you’re being handed.
None of these alone means anything. Three or four stacked in the same month usually isn’t bad luck.
Most people do one of two things when they notice: dismiss it, because acting on it means admitting the possibility while the salary and title still feel real, or panic, and start making big decisions from fear.
Neither’s right. The move is quiet and early: update the resume while you’re still stable, reconnect with your network before you need them, build some visibility outside your current company’s walls, and actually find out your notice period and severance formula before you’re negotiating from zero information under stress.
I go through all of this in more depth, more of the six, and the actual mechanics behind each signal, in the video. Watch it here:
