A field guide for navigating layoffs, restructures, and transitions in Trust & Safety. Built on evidence, community, and one next action at a time, by someone who has walked that road many times.
And if today is not a day you have 90 minutes of anything to give: start with rest. Make space for yourself and, when the time is right, start on the journey to what's next.
"In late 2022, my team was the first safety team affected at my organization. I had spent years building it from the ground up. And then I was the person disassembling it. Everything in this guide is something I discovered through doing, and it carries collective wisdom from across the industry: from agents and consultants to executive leaders, on both sides of the layoff."
~ Mike
"This guide is created in service of the Trust & Safety industry, which consists entirely of some of the most incredible, brilliant, versatile, and resilient people in the world. My goal is for you to realize a vision for your own vocation."Why this guide exists
Written for the whole industry: every term explained, no gatekeeping, one shared set of mechanics.
Your experience counts more than you think. Queue quality, judgment, and escalations are real evidence, and vendor-side experience is genuine T&S experience.
Position your experience →The guide works in order, exactly as written: steady yourself, position, build the kit, find the work, and stay on top of every application.
Start the journey →Your search is network-first and slower by nature. Some roles get created through conversations rather than posted. There's a path for that too.
Plug into your community →Platforms cut jobs; the ecosystem doesn't. Between roles you don't leave this industry, you move to another part of it. Every organization here will put you to work, hand you skills back, and give you a place to land.
Contribute to reports, weigh in on legislation, and consult directly with companies and governments. Yes, really.
Become a member →Working groups that publish reports, mentorship on both sides of the table, and the widest network in responsible tech.
Join a working group →The professional association: volunteer with programs and events, or write for the community.
Get involved →Write case studies and join reading groups on real T&S dilemmas. Build a portfolio of judgment you can point to.
Write a case study →Volunteer research at the frontier of the field: evidence for design that brings out the best in people.
Volunteer →Monthly Zoom calls with philosophers and practitioners. Sharpen the "why" behind every judgment call.
Join a call →The Best Practices Framework is the closest thing T&S has to an industry standard. Know it cold.
Read the framework →Help build the courses that bring new talent into the field, and gain the deepest kind of mastery: the kind you can explain.
How to plug in →Every one of these will put you to work: reports, case studies, mentorship, real consulting. How to plug into each ↓
Start with live opportunities and people. Build only the infrastructure required to move them forward. Click any part to read it below.
Nine parts, one loop. Hover any step, then click to read it. It ends where it begins: with people.
The circle is the point: step nine leads you back to being the person someone else's journey starts with.
First: I'm sorry you're facing a layoff or a transition. Whether it came by choice or not, and whatever rationale you were given (restructuring, a shift in mission, budget cuts, performance), hear this early and often: there is always a path forward.
Prefer Notion? Read the full guide there — you can even duplicate it into your own workspace and use it as your tracker.
And if today is not a day you have 90 minutes of anything to give: start with rest. Make space for yourself and, when the time is right, start on the journey to what's next.
When my layoff came, I was processing so much at once that I was essentially paralyzed. Ironically, I had just recovered from burnout and was full of energy for the year ahead. The layoff took that momentum away overnight. What helped:
Nearly everyone who is laid off becomes preoccupied with how the decision was made. I received great advice from one of my favorite managers: "I wouldn't focus on things that weren't within your control." Three traps to name so you can avoid them: overanalyzing yourself (everything could always have been done better, and it's still probably not why you were laid off), overanalyzing the organization (a topic for business school, not your search), and overanalyzing the landscape (I love a good social analysis of capitalism with a little Kierkegaard on the side, and it will only darken the lens on your industry at the exact moment you're trying to navigate it).
Instead, identify reasons to be grateful: the opportunities you had, the ways you grew, the things you shipped. You'll need those memories, told with genuine energy, in every interview. And focus on action: what you can control is what comes next.
Your career isn't formulated in an ivory tower of self-reflection, and you don't build resilience through isolation. Plug people into specific roles; it matches each person to what they're best at and respects everyone's time. My actual team:
Some are daily drivers, some are 4x a year. That's okay. And fun fact: you've just accidentally created a mini community. It will be the core of what launches you into what's next. Lean on them. Trust them. They got you.
"I'm a [role family] leader who has [proof of scale or impact]. I'm now focused on [specific problems or environments] where that experience can [business or user outcome]."
"My role was affected by a broader reduction. I'm proud of [one or two contributions], and I'm now focused on [role family/problem] where I can apply [relevant strengths]."
Keep it factual, short, and forward-looking. Remember: not your fault.
Develop 2–3 dozen brief STAR stories (Situation, Task, Action, Result), enough that you never repeat one across an interview panel. Name the risk, explain the judgment or system you introduced, describe the scale, quantify the outcome where safe and accurate, and state what you learned.
Progress over perfection. The resume and cover letters I sent out in December 2022 pale in comparison to what I had by February. But it was one of those early drafts that secured my next role.
The 80-20 rule. Start with the highest-priority roles where you're most likely to be a great fit, then widen as time allows. You'll need your energy for full interview cycles.
Launch, then iterate. Set up your resume, letters, and tracker, then improve them through real application cycles, not before beginning to use them.
Resilience starts with evidence, not cheerfulness. The headwinds are real: platform safety teams have seen repeated cuts since 2022, and fewer roles are remote-friendly than the field once promised (Alice Hunsberger and Ben Whitelaw dug into the data). And yet the field itself is growing: TrustCon went from roughly 300 people in 2022 to 1,384 attendees from 400+ companies in 2025, and the EU's DSA and UK's Online Safety Act are driving real hiring demand for safety work. Demand for your judgment is not disappearing. It is moving, and this section helps you follow it.
| Source | Best for |
|---|---|
| Trust & Safety Jobs | Dedicated T&S listings with role, location, salary, and remote filters. |
| T&S Job Tuesday (Jeff Dunn) | A weekly curated drop of fresh T&S roles on LinkedIn. |
| BHR Group Digital Rights Careers | Digital-rights, policy, law, human-rights, and civil-society roles. |
| TSPA Job Board | T&S roles across functions, levels, locations, and work models. |
| All Tech Is Human | Responsible-tech roles beyond platform companies. |
| T&S Network Starter Kit | A maintained directory of boards, orgs, and career resources. |
| Company career pages | The authoritative source; some jobs never circulate through boards. |
The same work may sit under Legal, Operations, Product, Risk, Security, Public Policy, Customer Experience, Responsible AI, or Global Affairs. Rotate terms like: content policy, escalations, incident response, threat intelligence, marketplace risk, account integrity, safety data science, red teaming, civic integrity, community operations.
Keep a watchlist of 15–25 organizations, and include more than social media: marketplaces, payments, gaming, dating, AI, SaaS, civil society, regulators, and service providers all hire from a comparable pool of talent. Triage every role before applying: A: strong fit (prioritize immediately), B: plausible fit (apply selectively), C: low fit (save only if it teaches you something). A smaller number of well-supported applications beats treating every listing as equally valuable.
T&S Coffee Hours (I host some of these!), the Responsible Tech Mentorship Program, and T&S Mentor Match, Jeff Dunn's free list of volunteer mentors. Bring a focused question, draft, or decision, and record the action you'll take afterward.
I hired a coach during my own search. The highest-leverage moments are positioning, interview preparation, and negotiation. Coaches I can point you to:
A referral is a routing advantage, not a guarantee. Warm path (someone knows your work), bridge path (someone can introduce you), cold path (lead with relevance, keep the request small). Prepare a referral packet: the live link, requisition number, a forwardable résumé, and two or three bullets proving fit against the role's top requirements. Follow up once after five to seven business days, thank people regardless of outcome, and never ask anyone to exaggerate how well they know you.
| Stage | Required next action |
|---|---|
| Found | Check location, level, scope, pay range, and closing date. |
| Qualified | Name the top three requirements you can prove. |
| Referral path | Send the referral packet or request a short perspective call. |
| Applying | Finish the résumé, application, and any requested work sample. |
| Applied | Record the date, version used, contact, and next follow-up. |
| Interviewing | Track stage, interviewer, questions, thank-you, and preparation. |
| Offer / decision | Score the role, negotiate, and set a decision date. |
| Closed | Capture one lesson and close the loop with anyone who helped. |
A daily light scan; two focused application blocks; two relationship blocks; one interview-preparation block; one development block; and protected recovery time, a recurring block when the search is deliberately closed. Track qualified roles found, warm paths identified, and conversations held. Application count alone can hide a weak strategy.
A high-severity incident; an ambiguous policy decision; a cross-functional disagreement; a program built from zero; a measurable improvement; a failure you'd handle differently; a difficult stakeholder; a people-leadership example. Prepare a 60-second version and a deeper version of each.
How you balance safety, expression, privacy, fairness, feasibility, and business goals. How you act when policy, product behavior, data, and real-world harm conflict. How you use automation or AI without hiding uncertainty. How you measure outcomes without optimizing only for easy-to-count enforcement volume.
What decisions will this role own? Where does the team sit, and which executive is accountable? What wellbeing and exposure-management practices exist for people handling harmful material? What would strong performance look like after 30, 90, and 180 days?
Mandate (real authority and executive support), Manager (creates clarity, advocates, handles disagreement), Resources (headcount, tooling, on-call coverage), Wellbeing (exposure, rotation, leave, mental-health support treated as operational requirements), Stability, Growth, and Terms, assessed together.
Ask for the offer in writing, identify the items that materially affect acceptance, and negotiate those clearly.
Build your own foundation. I read industry reports going back years, built policy frameworks, and turned case studies into toolkits I still use: in interviews, in roles, in life.
Put stuff out there. Transparency work and legislative input at the Integrity Institute, writing on privacy with TSPA, and co-building a T&S course with the Teaching Consortium.
Help others now, not when you have the job. I can't empirically prove it, but helping others is how I help myself. It kept my professional identity larger than the search.
Going through a layoff and coming out the other side is, ultimately, an extremely valuable experience that has made you a better practitioner at your craft. And now you are empowered to be the ultimate resource to others. Spend the rest of your career helping them too.
Ready-to-adapt scripts, so the search can restart quickly after a hard day.
Hi [Name], I'm exploring [role family/problem area] and your work on [specific topic] stood out. Would you be open to a 15–20 minute conversation about how your team approaches [focused question]? I'm not asking you to find me a job; I'd value your perspective.
Hi [Name], I'm applying for [Role] at [Company]. The work lines up closely with my experience in [two relevant areas], especially [brief proof]. If you're comfortable referring me, I've included the posting, requisition number, résumé, and three fit bullets below. No pressure if you're not close enough to the team or process.
Hi [Name], I applied for [Role] on [Date] and remain very interested. The strongest connection is [one concise fit statement]. If the process is active, I'd be glad to provide any additional context or work samples.
Thank you for the conversation about [Role]. I especially appreciated the discussion of [specific challenge]. It reinforced my interest because [brief connection to your evidence]. I'd be excited to help the team [relevant outcome].
Thank you again for helping with [Role]. The process has now [advanced/closed], and I appreciated your support. One useful thing I learned was [brief takeaway]. Please let me know how I can be helpful to you in return.
This guide is far from the only one. For a second perspective:
And the full, always-current resource list lives in the Notion guide.