The message from Washington DC is to keep people employed, that the 3rd stimulus bill that passed included the Payroll Protection Program (PPP). This is a Small Business Administration (SBA) loan to keep employees on payroll for 2 months, but it is only for small businesses. The intent is that the loan is forgiven if a small business’s employee headcount does not shrink. If you are an employee of a small business that gets that loan, you are likely safe for April and May of 2020. No one knows if business will return by June, or if there will be another bill to help out.
There is no such incentive for businesses over 500 people. Privately held businesses can look longer term to estimate headcount needed, but public companies have been shorter sighted for at least the last 40 years, since they tend to cater to quarterly results to keep stockholders happy. It is well known that the next couple of quarterly earnings reports for most companies will be less than ideal - so larger companies may hold on to people for a little while to try to see what the recovery will look like. Some harder hit industries have already let people go, and others are considering it now.
Some companies will take this opportunity to reduce staff. The question is, how much? Condor.co has a crowd sourced list of data from over 4900 companies, and the hiring status of each. Of the ~5400 companies, ~2860 are hiring, ~1900 have hiring freezes, ~ 350 have frozen some and are hiring others, ~70 are rescinding offers, and >340 are having layoffs. These do not include any pay cuts or firing of contractors or seasonal part time workers.
I expect the numbers to get worse before they get better. So what can you do to avoid being laid off?
Some companies will need to make deeper cuts than others. You need to guess how deep the cut will be. Then it may be department dependent, so you'll have to decide the relative importance of your department to the short-term results and long-term strategy. The higher importance rank, the safer you are.
If you think 10% will be laid off, then estimate where you rank compared to those in your department. If you are below the cutoff and don’t want to be let go, you need to become as helpful as possible very quickly.
There is much more that goes into the decision on who to let go, but if you can estimate the info above, you’ll have a rough idea of where you stand and how safe you are in your job.