'It's difficult without being inside those companies to really point a finger at why these tech companies are shutting people,' Minshew said. Kathryn Minshew, founder and CEO of The Muse, a Gen Z and millennial-focused job search platform, agrees it certainly at least looks like companies are piggybacking off of each other with layoffs. Now, companies are laying off, and everybody decided to follow each other and lay people off.' They followed on the way up companies were hiring, so everybody decided to hire. 'We see one company doing something and everybody follows. 'A lot of this is just imitation,' Pfeffer told Insider. Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, attributed the layoffs to 'copycat behavior' in an interview with Stanford News in December. Since the start of 2023, numerous companies have laid off workers, including Google, Microsoft, and Zoom, picking up on job cuts that started in the second half of 2022.
'Copycat layoffs' is the idea that companies are being influenced by one another as they cut jobs. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
