[noonat]

Both? I've been in situations where a company implodes like this, and employees at the company are often already being head-hunted by previous employees (who departed during a prior round of lay-offs, or who left of their own volition before the company fell apart) before they are fired.

While it's often something of a surprise when you finally do get the axe, you usually have a sense of impending doom, and a feeling that bad things are going down, before it happens. Projects stop getting traction. Upper management stops caring as much about what you're working on. Everyone becomes very apathetic. You get a rash of invites on LinkedIn, and people start updating their resumes.

So, it's rarely a complete surprise, and people often already have some idea of where they're going to go, or are ready to start looking.

[georgemcbay]

"You get a rash of invites on LinkedIn, and people start updating their resumes."

When I was working at chumby industries and it was imploding, it occurred to me that somebody could probably write a really good predictor of imminent company failure by scrapping LinkedIn data and watching for sudden surges of activity from people working at the same company.

I'd be surprised if someone (or multiple someones) doesn't already have something like that running, even if just for their own private purposes.

[tomkarlo]

I believe (subscribed) recruiters can already search by which profiles have been most recently updated. Just keeping track of that info plus the linked company would be enough, particularly if they expose it via an API.

[joezydeco]

Can you subscribe to some kind of 'firehose' feed on LinkedIn that lets you get to that information? Or do you have to be connected to each and every person?

(BTW thanks for Chumby while it lasted. Great product.)

[georgemcbay]

I never really looked too much at the LinkedIn API, I suspect for the idea to work well you'd probably need to scrape data from the frontend and preferably be connected to a few "super node"-esque people (recruiters, etc).

(You're welcome for what bits of chumby I touched. Of course I was just one developer in a team of wonderful developers and hardware designers. It was a great job and a lot of fun. I still haven't decided if we were a bit too late (introduction of iPhone and Android) or too early (explosion in hackable maker devices like Raspberry Pi). I guess a bit of both.

[tomkarlo]

Presumably, when a company is laying someone off, ex-employees don't have to worry about non-poaching agreements they might have in place with the employer. The easiest person to hire is someone you've worked with in the past and liked, and the easiest job to pick is one working for/with people you know.