Be WARN-ed: Layoff Lookout is Getting Noticed

If you have ever been laid off at a job, you probably felt like you took a sucker punch to the head – you never saw it coming.

Though both are only 19 years old, cousins Jacob Goldman and Noah Schwartz feel your pain.

“We heard stories of people who worked for their companies for decades, [and] they find out they’re fired because they can’t sign in to their work computer,” says company co-founder and Ballston Lake resident Goldman. “We thought that was so wrong, so unethical, to turn someone’s life upside down like that, so we figured out there was something that could be done about it.”

So, they did.

Earlier this year, the two college students unveiled Layoff Lookout, a free service that provides early email alerts concerning company layoffs. 

“If you knew you were going to lose your job in two months, would you have gone on vacation?” says Goldman, soon to begin his sophomore year at Flagler College in St. Augustine, Fla. “You wouldn’t go out to dinner as often, and then that also gives you at least a two-month head start on your job search. So when you feel that hand on your shoulder, that’s not the end of your life, but maybe you have another job lined up. So maybe that’s the start of your new life.”

The service monitors the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, passed into law by Congress in 1988 to provide workers with sufficient time to prepare for the transition between the jobs they currently hold and new jobs. The legislation requires all employers to submit to their state a notice when they will be performing mass layoffs up to 60 days in advance.  

According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration, a WARN notice is required when a business with 100 or more full-time workers (not counting those who have fewer than six months on the job or who work fewer than 20 hours per week) plans to lay off at least 50 people at a single site of employment. (Under New York state law, if a company employs 50 or more workers and is laying off 25 or more, it must provide a 90-day notice.) The main problem is that most employees are unaware of the WARN Act, and don’t know they may be laid off until right before the axe falls.

The Layoff Lookout program collects WARN notices from all 50 states and Washington, D.C., utilizing information from 51 different databases. Every day, it runs a comparison with all its user data to help inform its clients.

For those on the mailing list: “If you worked at, let’s say, Amazon in New York, and [that company] was going to do layoffs, you would get an email [announcing that fact],” Goldman says. “It’s all automated.”

The sign-up process is easy – after a prospective user finds the website (layofflookout.com), “All you do is scroll down, you put in your employer, you select your state, you put in your email [address], you hit ‘Get started’ and you’re on our list, and we’ll automatically send you an email if an employer posts a [WARN] notice,” Goldman says.

There is no doubt there is a need for such a service. As of April of this year, 71.3-million people in America were employed by companies that qualify for WARN notices. At the end of last year and the start of this one, some of the behemoths of American industry – Disney, Amazon, Meta, and Twitter (now rebranded as “X”) – collectively laid off tens of thousands of workers. 

According to statistics Goldman gleaned from various sources, 28% of Americans have been laid off in the last two years. People are 83% more likely to develop a stress-related health condition – such as hypertension, heart disease, and high blood pressure – in the year to 18 months following a layoff. Above it all, 48% of Americans have at least some level of layoff anxiety.

Now, thanks to this intrepid duo, there is a potential solution. Goldman, a business administration major, says that he and Schwartz – who lives in Burlington, Vermont – would “bounce ideas off” each other on their “multiple” visits to see each other every year.  

“We always had dreams of starting something together… We had a lot of ideas, whether it was a video we wanted to make, a little movie, a crazy business idea.” 

It was Schwartz, a mechanical engineering major at the University of Vermont, who got the ball rolling on their latest project after messaging his cousin an article he saw about WARN notices in mid-March of this year. After countless 3:00 a.m. Facetime brainstorming sessions over the next month, the two underclassmen worked up their Layoff Lookout idea, and presented the concept individually at their respective colleges’ business-pitch competitions this Spring. Goldman earned a third-place honor at Flagler, while Schwartz took home the top prize at UVM. 

After making his business-pitch presentation, Goldman said, “I had one professor come up to me, and he said, ‘When you said it was free, I couldn’t believe it. With widespread implementation, that’s really going to shift how corporate America operates – [toward] a more ethical direction.’” 

With the money each won at the competitions, the cousins hired a pair of computer engineers to streamline the program and make it more accessible to a larger audience. 

“We built out our business plan and did a lot of research to find if there was something similar, and there really isn’t something that checks all the boxes we’re doing and [is] completely free,” Goldman says.

“Our first step is the email alert. Moving forward, we will build out an email newsletter that would provide news on a national scale… Because if you work at Morgan Stanley in New York [City], you want to know if Goldman [Sachs], across the street is going to [be laying off workers]. We plan a premium tier that would provide all the data that we collect in a digestible, usable method in charts and graphs—having different data analysis on it.”

At this point, the program is not complete: “We’re in the beta stages of building out our email service,” Goldman said. “You can sign up now, and as soon as the full version goes live, notifications will start rolling out.” 

As for the here and now: “We’re just trying to do our part and help as many people as we can. We felt that’s our duty, that’s our job: to bring that [layoff awareness] to the public.”

Take control of job security with layoff alerts. For more information, follow Layoff Lookout on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and www.layofflookout.com.