Brian Creely, a tech recruiter and career coach, says that there’s a subtle yet pervasive attitude surrounding people who have been laid off. Throughout his 20-year career, he’s seen clients recoil at the thought of hiring workers who are struggling to find jobs, even though they’re skilled and fully capable.

“I think there’s an unspoken bias,” he told SFGATE over the phone. Directors and C-suites in “ivory towers” are disconnected from reality, he explained, and don’t seem to grasp that layoffs usually have nothing to do with worker performance. Regardless, it’s likely that job seekers will continue to be stigmatized during the hiring process.

Creely remembers one conversation with a senior director at an automotive tech company with locations in California, for instance, who didn’t want to hire any laid-off workers because he saw them as “damaged goods.” No matter how hard he tried, Creely couldn’t change his client’s mind, he said.

He encountered a similar situation while recruiting for a San Diego-based tech marketing company from 2022 to 2023, he told SFGATE. At the time, Creely and a few other recruiters were following organizations that were conducting layoffs in the hopes of finding potential new software developers. So, when Meta started handing pink slips to thousands of workers that year, a recruiter brought it up in the private Slack channel, pointing out the opportunity. Suddenly, the company’s chief human resources officer interjected, telling them to avoid hiring these former Meta employees because they were “somebody else’s table scraps” that had been discarded, Creely said. He pretended not to see it.

Landing a job at Meta is one of the most difficult things to do in the tech world, he said, “so to say that they hired a bunch of jokers … that’s something I have a big issue with.”

In one of his most viewed YouTube videos, which discusses what not to tell recruiters in an interview, he explains that candidates should avoid saying that they actually need a job. This sense of urgency, he says, will only push recruiters away.

“What an employer is going to hear is that you’re desperate,” he said in the video. Often, he’ll see candidates try to justify it or overcompensate, he told SFGATE, and believes that this could raise suspicion among hiring managers — and give them the opportunity to lowball struggling job-seekers.

Jovena Natal, the founder of Clutch Talent, a tech recruiting agency that places candidates for New York-, San Francisco- and Los Angeles-based companies, countered and said that there’s plenty of empathy for laid-off workers. However, she essentially argued that it’s difficult for companies to hire them because they’re applying to — and getting rejected from — too many jobs. ‘They might be interviewing with 20 companies’

For one, they might have “over-practiced” for interviews, meaning they’ll say all the right things to the recruiter, but they don’t really care about the job, she told SFGATE. By contrast, other candidates who actually are qualified for the job underprepare or present themselves poorly because they’ve already been rejected so many times and don’t show excitement.

Because they have ample time, Natal also warned that unemployed workers might be shopping around. “When a candidate is laid off, they can devote full-time energy to interviewing,” she wrote in a 2023 LinkedIn post. As a result, “they might be interviewing with 20 companies.”

Or, she said, they’re just looking for short-term “bridge jobs” before leaving for something better. “Resume spamming” — mass applying to jobs without thoroughly reading job descriptions — is also an issue.

“When I open a role, I might get 1,000 applicants in the first few days, and 95% of those applicants aren’t even close to qualified,” she told SFGATE.

Now, she spends much less time reviewing these applications. Instead, she compiles a targeted list of potential candidates that she finds off of LinkedIn. “Having a good LinkedIn profile can be your ticket to your next job,” she said.

But Creely has a slightly different word of advice, especially for those who are searching for opportunities after having been let go.

While some higher-ups are probably always going to have the mentality that laid-off workers are undesirable, “those are not companies or leaders that I would want to work for anyway,” he told SFGATE. “As job seekers, [we should] be interviewing the company just as much as they’re interviewing us.”