Laid off in Canada? What to do in the first 30 days

What should you do in the first week after a layoff?

Handle the official side once, capture your evidence, ask for references and tell people. Do not send fifty applications on day two. Applications sent in a panic, with a resume written for the job you just lost, are the ones that go nowhere.

1. Deal with the official side, from official sources. Severance, termination pay, Employment Insurance and anything to do with immigration status are outside what we coach, and we give no advice on them. Go straight to the source: the federal EI regular benefits page¹, the employment standards for your province or territory, linked from the federal government's list of federally regulated workplaces² (in Ontario, for example, the termination chapter of the Employment Standards Act guide³), and, if you are on a work permit, IRCC's page on changing jobs or employers, which has a section headed "If you lose your job"⁴. One thing to know on day one: the EI page itself says to apply as soon as you stop working¹. If anything is unclear, ask the office that runs it.
2. Write your achievement list before you forget it. Projects, numbers, problems you fixed, people who would vouch for you. Today you remember the details. In two months you will remember the job title. This list becomes your new resume bullets and your interview stories.
3. Ask for references while the goodwill is fresh. Utban's managers told him they had tried to keep him. If yours said something similar, ask them this week whether they will be a reference, and whether they would write a short LinkedIn recommendation.
4. Tell people. Your network cannot help with a search it does not know about. One short, calm message is enough. There is an example in the LinkedIn section below.

How do you explain a layoff to an employer?

One sentence of fact, one sentence of value, then forward. "My role was eliminated in a restructuring. Before that, I [a specific result]. Now I'm looking for [the role in front of them]." No apology, no blame, no long story about the company's finances.

What you want the listener to take away is that it was the business, not you, and that you are already pointed at what comes next. Two rules underneath it. Only call it a layoff if it was one. And say it the same way everywhere, on your resume, on LinkedIn and in the room, so nothing contradicts anything else.

On your resume

• Keep the job, with its real end date. Do not stretch the dates to hide the gap. A gap is easier to explain than a date someone can check.
• You do not need to write "laid off". The resume is for what you did. If you want to answer the question before it is asked, one line under the role is enough: Role eliminated in a company-wide restructuring, [month and year].
• Rebuild the top third for the role you want next, not the one you lost. The method is in Bani Singh's guide to tailoring your resume to a target role.

On LinkedIn

LinkedIn is how my $185K job found me. After I landed my first Canadian job, I added it to my profile and started documenting my work there. I got loud about my skills and experience. One day a recruiter reached out with that offer. I never applied for it.

So after a layoff, the profile matters more, not less.

• Your headline is your target role, not your situation. "Laid off" and "Open to work" describe where you are, not what you are worth. The full method, including the Open to Work setting, is in my guide to the LinkedIn profile recruiters actually find.
• If you post about it, keep it short and forward. For example:

My role at [company] was eliminated last week as part of a wider restructuring. In [time] there, I [one specific result]. I'm now looking for [target role] roles in [city]. If you know a team that needs this, I would be grateful for an introduction.

Posting is a personal choice. If you do it, that is the whole post. No bitterness, and nothing about the people who made the decision.

In interviews

Use three parts and then stop talking.

In [month], [company] cut a number of roles in a restructuring, and mine was one of them. While I was there, I [specific result, with a number if you have one]. What I want now is [what this role offers], which is why this one stood out to me.

That is about twenty seconds. If they ask a follow-up, answer it in one sentence and come back to the job in front of you. If your manager has agreed to be a reference, say so. It closes the question better than anything else you can say.

Practise it out loud until it sounds boring to you. The first time you hear yourself say it should not be in the interview. The same goes for your opening answer, which is covered in how to answer "Tell me about yourself".

How do you restart applications and networking after a layoff?

Choose the target first, go to people before job boards, and measure what comes back. The layoff did not change what you are good at. It changed who knows you are available.

• Pick one target role and hold it. Bani Singh has written about the cycle that traps people in a long search: they get rejected, decide a friend's field looks easier, switch, and start the whole cycle again. If you are not sure where to aim, start with how to choose a career path that fits you.
• Start with your warmest network. Former colleagues and managers know your work, and some of them now sit at other companies. Not every referral is equal, though. A colleague typing your name into a "referred by" field is weak. Someone who emails the hiring manager and says "look at this application" is strong. The scripts are in how to network for a job in Canada.
• Measure interviews per 30 applications, not total applications. If that number is not moving, the fix is in why you are not getting interviews in Canada.
• Connect with your interviewers afterwards. Utban sends a LinkedIn connection request to the people who interviewed him after every interview.

Your first 30 days, week by week

Week four is where people either settle into a rhythm or start flailing. If you are flailing, the plan is not the problem. Usually it is that nobody outside your own head has looked at your resume, your target or your answers.

How do you handle the confidence hit?

Separate who you are from the title you lost, and put your energy only into what you can control. That is easier to write than to do, so here is how it went for me.

I had a $185K salary and thought I had made it. Then one day: "We're downsizing. Your position has been eliminated." The problem was that I had tied my entire identity to that job. Anxiety attacks followed. Sleepless nights. My confidence was completely shattered.

That period is also where the idea for Immigrant Ninja came from. I am not telling you a layoff is secretly a gift. I am telling you that what you do in the months after it decides what it turns into. It is okay to struggle. It is not okay to stay stuck.

Three things that help:

• Your title is not your identity. Utban, who was laid off twice, put it better than I can: "Your title is not your life. You are bigger than that and keep working yourself."
• Work inside your circle of control. Bani Singh's version: you cannot control the number of openings or who else is interviewing. You can control your skills, how seriously you run the search, and what you learn from each rejection.
• Remember you need one offer. Not ten. Every rejection before that one is part of the search, not a ruling on you.

Layoffs are also more ordinary than they feel from the inside. In September 2026, Statistics Canada put the layoff rate, the share of people employed in August who became unemployed in September because of a layoff, at 0.7%⁵. That is a lot of people, in a single month, starting exactly where you are.

What changes if you have been laid off twice?

Your explanation gets one sentence longer, and the confidence work matters more. Almost nothing else changes. The plan above still applies.

Utban was laid off twice in Canada in two and a half years. Both times, his direct managers said almost 100 people had been let go and that they had tried to keep him. It was not about him, but there were people who made fun of him for it. The second layoff came in October, at a time when a lot else in his life was happening at once.

He joined the coaching in December. About three months later he had an offer as a Revenue & Operations Specialist. The process ran six rounds, seven counting a test, and included an interview presentation, something he had never made before. The company offered $70K. He negotiated it to $73K, moved his paid time off from 14 days to unlimited, and got benefits from day one instead of after probation. His full story is in Utban's case study.

Figures our students shared with us, compiled by Immigrant Ninja.

Those are one student's results, from his own recorded interview, not a promise or a typical outcome. What carries over is the pattern.

• Explain both layoffs in one breath. "I've been through two restructurings in [time]. Both were wide cuts, and both managers are happy to speak to my work." Only say the last part if it is true.
• Do not let a second layoff push you into accepting the first number. After two layoffs it is tempting to grab whatever is offered. Utban still negotiated. So can you, and how to negotiate salary in Canada shows what to say.
• Watch other people who have done it. Two of the student stories on our channel are titled "He got laid off twice in 🇨🇦 | $73,000 offer?!" and "From getting LAID OFF in 🇨🇦 to closing 2 offers worth $163,000 in his field!". You can watch the recorded conversations and judge for yourself on our reviews and success stories page.

What to do this week

1. Go to the official pages for EI, employment standards and, if it applies, your work permit. Do it once, then close those tabs.
2. Write the achievement list and ask two people to be references.
3. Write your one-sentence explanation and say it out loud until it sounds boring.

Then follow the 30-day table. One target, people before job boards, and interviews per 30 applications as your only scoreboard.