Job market glossary

35 terms

RIF (Reduction in Force)Layoffs & HR

HR's formal term for permanently cutting positions. A RIF is aimed at roles rather than at how well anyone performed, unlike being fired for cause, which is why strong performers get caught in them.

WARN ActMoney & Legal

A US federal law that requires employers with 100 or more staff to give 60 days' notice before a mass layoff or plant closure. Many states have stricter 'mini-WARN' versions. Some companies pay 60 days' wages in lieu of notice.

SeveranceMoney & Legal

Pay and benefits you get when you're let go, usually in exchange for signing a release of legal claims. A common tech formula is a base amount plus one to two weeks per year of service. You can negotiate more of it than most people assume, especially your leaving date and how equity and healthcare are handled.

Garden leaveMoney & Legal

Being paid through your notice period without working. You're technically still employed, so vesting continues and you can't join a competitor, but you're locked out of every system.

PIP (Performance Improvement Plan)Layoffs & HR

A formal performance process that, in practice, often works as a documented way out the door. From 2023 to 2025, performance frameworks became a common way to carry out planned headcount cuts (see Meta's 'low performer' rounds).

Quiet firingLayoffs & HR

Making a job unpleasant or invisible enough that the person leaves on their own. The projects dry up, the raises stop, and they get left out of meetings. The employer saves on severance.

Quiet hiringMarket Dynamics

Filling skill gaps without adding headcount, through internal moves, contractors and, more and more often, AI tools. It's one reason job postings understate how much real labor demand is shifting.

Ghost jobMarket Dynamics

A posting the employer isn't actively trying to fill. It stays up to build a pipeline, make the company look like it's growing, or satisfy a posting policy. Surveys through 2024 suggested a large share of listings fit the description, which is why response rates to applications collapsed.

BackfillLayoffs & HR

Hiring someone to replace a person who left. A 'no backfill' policy is how a company shrinks without announcing layoffs, a RIF nobody has to call a RIF.

Attrition (natural)Layoffs & HR

Letting headcount shrink through normal departures, with no cuts. It's how IBM has handled roles affected by AI: nobody gets fired, and people who leave just don't get replaced.

Hiring freezeMarket Dynamics

A pause on new hires. Historically it's been the most reliable warning of layoffs one to two quarters out, and it's the first lever every CFO pulls.

The Great FlatteningMarket Dynamics

The 2023 to 2025 push to remove layers of middle management, with wider spans of control, fewer coordinators and more player-coaches. Meta, Amazon, Google and Microsoft all made it explicit policy.

Span of controlLayoffs & HR

The number of direct reports a manager has. Norms are rising, from about 6 to 8 toward 10 to 15, and that arithmetic sits behind a lot of management layoffs.

Efficiency eraMarket Dynamics

The period since 2022 in which investors reward cost discipline over growth at all costs. It's why profitable companies keep cutting.

Over-hiring correctionMarket Dynamics

The unwinding of 2020 to 2021 pandemic hiring, when big tech grew 40 to 60% to meet a demand spike that partly reversed. It caused most of the 2022 to 2023 layoffs.

AI-first companyAI & Work

A company that makes teams explain why AI can't do a job before they're allowed to hire a person for it. Shopify's 2025 memo made the template public. The default goes from 'hire' to 'automate, then hire'.

AI attributionAI & Work

Whether a layoff really is tied to AI (substitution or reallocation) or AI is just the story wrapped around ordinary cost-cutting. We flag it conservatively in our tracker, only when the company or credible reporting made the link.

Task exposure vs. job exposureAI & Work

AI automates tasks, and a job title is a bundle of them. A role is exposed to the extent its tasks are routine, digital and clearly specified, which is why parts of law score higher than parts of plumbing.

Human-in-the-loopAI & Work

A setup where AI does the work and a person reviews, approves or corrects it. That's what most 'automated' work looks like in the near term, and it's where a lot of the surviving roles end up.

Agentic AI / AI agentsAI & Work

AI systems that carry out multi-step tasks on their own, like handling a support ticket from start to finish, instead of answering one prompt at a time. This is the technology behind the support-team cuts of 2025.

RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)AI & Work

Connecting an AI model to your own documents or data so its answers come from them. It's usually the first LLM feature a team ships, and a resume keyword that measurably improves response rates.

Reskilling / UpskillingAI & Work

Reskilling means training for a different role. Upskilling means going deeper in the one you have. Accenture spelled out the stakes in 2025: staff who can't be reskilled for AI delivery get 'exited'.

Equity cliff / vestingMoney & Legal

Stock compensation you earn over time, typically over 4 years with a 1-year cliff. Layoff timing matters a lot here. Leave before the cliff and you can lose all of it, so your departure date is one of the first things to negotiate.

Exercise windowMoney & Legal

How long you have after leaving to buy your vested stock options, often only 90 days. Plenty of laid-off employees find this out too late, and it's one of the more expensive surprises in the whole process.

COBRAMoney & Legal

The US rule that lets you keep your employer's health insurance after you leave, at full cost, which often comes as a shock. Severance deals frequently include a few months of COBRA paid by the employer.

OutplacementMoney & Legal

Career-transition help (coaching, resume work) that employers sometimes pay for when they lay people off. Ask for it by name in severance talks, since it costs the company little.

Boomerang employeeLayoffs & HR

Someone rehired by a company that laid them off. It's getting more common as firms cut broadly and then find out which capabilities they actually needed.

DelayeringLayoffs & HR

Cutting out whole tiers of management in one go. Uber's September 2026 restructuring is the textbook case: 20% fewer managers, half as many one- and two-person teams, and no role more than seven layers below the CEO.

Voluntary buyout / early-retirement programMoney & Legal

A paid offer to leave before any layoff is announced, usually open only to people whose age plus tenure clears a threshold. Microsoft's first-ever buyout (April 2026, open to about 7% of US staff) showed big tech using it to shrink without WARN notices or fights over severance.

Rolling layoffsLayoffs & HR

Small cuts repeated through the year instead of one big announcement. They're harder to track and easier for a company to explain. If you're interviewing, 'has this company cut twice this year?' is the most useful due-diligence question you can ask.

AI washingAI & Work

Blaming a layoff on AI when the real reason is cost, over-hiring or a bad quarter. Our tracker's AI badge is there to tell the two apart, and we only mark an event as AI-attributed when the company itself or credible reporting made the link.

EvalsAI & Work

Systematic tests of how well an AI system does a task, roughly what a QA suite is for ordinary software. Employers now hire specifically for people who write good evals, and 'evals engineer' has become a job title at labs and enterprises.

Forward-deployed engineerAI & Work

An engineer who works inside a customer's organization to make a product, usually an AI system, fit that customer's real workflows. Half engineer, half consultant, and one of the fastest-growing titles at the AI labs in 2026.

Residency (entry-level)Market Dynamics

A structured 12- to 24-month entry program that replaces the classic junior hire with rotations, mentorship and explicit skill gates. It's spreading in 2026 as companies try to rebuild the junior pipeline most of them stopped feeding in 2023.

Open to workMarket Dynamics

LinkedIn's public badge for job seekers. People argue about it endlessly, and the data suggests recruiters do filter on it, in both directions. A referral still beats any badge.