Jobs One Year After the Bloodbath: Hope & Pain
'Knowing somebody, sending your resume, getting an interview . . . it doesn't work like that anymore.' Still, one headhunter expects a 'renaissance in '25 or '26'
This is the latest in my series examining the entertainment job market. So far I’ve looked at how production-related businesses have been affected, the career fields still growing in Hollywood, and current job postings at Disney, WBD, Amazon, plus Netflix and NBCU.
Dear readers, a brutal anniversary is here: It’s been one year since a swath of layoffs began tearing a hole in the industry, gutting Walt Disney Co., Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery. Collectively, the three traditional entertainment giants slashed thousands of studio and network jobs in Hollywood. Disney alone laid off 7,000 workers between March and the end of May last year.
Some fortunate souls found places to land. Others, amid a grueling twinset of strikes that would devour the rest of 2023, were less fortunate. Most of the cuts didn’t hit the highest echelons of these companies but rather more rank-and-file employees and middle-management executives. I checked in with several of these cashiered execs to get a sense of the job market over the past 12 months — and what changes they’ve had to make to survive.
“There's a whole lot of qualified people out there not working,” says Bill Simon, an executive recruiter at Korn Ferry who specializes in entertainment. “By the same token, the skills and experience and expertise that they have may or may not be what these companies need today. Or tomorrow. So it's complicated.”
In this week’s Series Business, we’ll dig into:
An assessment of the landscape, a year after all those mass layoffs
Why traditional job sites aren’t cutting it and why LinkedIn can be a “vortex of hell”
How deep of a pay cut some execs are willing to take in search of a new job
Why one career-shift stigma has finally — mercifully — been lifted
Why one-top headhunter still thinks there will be a jobs ‘renaissance’ — if you can wait
The death of romanticism in TV land — and why that too may be a good thing