The Layoff Headline You’re Reading Wrong

You saw the headline. “Amazon cuts more than 27,000 jobs.”

You made a mental note: cross Amazon off the list.

That’s the wrong move.

Right now, Amazon has 24,193 open positions. Their total workforce has grown 11% over the last two years. Program and project management roles alone are up 137% in the last six months.^[1]

The layoff wasn’t a warning sign. It was a reallocation — one set of roles cut on one end, a different set added on the other. That’s not a company in trouble. That’s a company deciding where it’s going next.

You’re not going to read that in the headline.

What’s actually happening when a company “cuts”

When a layoff announcement drops, most job seekers update their mental blacklist. That company becomes a no. Sometimes the whole industry becomes a no. Entire categories of employers get quietly crossed off, based on one news cycle.

Meanwhile, hiring continues in the same building.

Charles Schwab announced significant layoffs in 2023. In the same period, their total workforce grew 9% over two years. As of Q2 2026, they have 989 open roles — Engineering up 73% in six months, Product Management up 135%.^[1]

The headline said they were cutting. The data said they were growing.

This is the gap most job seekers are navigating by the wrong signal.

The investing analogy that reframed everything for me

In investing, there’s a strategy built around one filter: find the companies that have grown their dividend consistently for years. Not just this quarter — for a decade or more.

The logic is that consistency signals something about a company’s underlying health that no single quarter can fake. A company growing its dividend through recessions and market crashes isn’t getting lucky. It’s built differently.

I started thinking about job searching the same way.

Don’t filter by who made the news this week. Find the companies that have been consistently growing their workforce for years — through slowdowns, through restructures, through everything. Those are the companies doing something right. And they keep hiring because they keep growing.

I know this personally

I got my job at Schwab not by reading layoff news, but by watching where the hiring volume was moving.

They were in the middle of a major expansion — adding large numbers of employees over a short stretch. I was paying attention to where the weight of the market was moving, got in front of it, and landed a role that lasted about four years.

About four years. Which, as it turns out, is almost exactly the median job tenure in America — 3.9 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.^[2]

The job was always going to be temporary. Every job is. The move was being strategic about which temporary I chose.

How to see the trend yourself

A few things are publicly available:

On any company’s LinkedIn page, the Jobs tab shows current open roles by department. Volume and distribution are visible without a subscription.

SEC annual reports (10-K filings) list total employee count every year. EDGAR at sec.gov is free. Macrotrends.net aggregates this data visually without the legalese.

LinkedIn Premium company insights show headcount growth percentages, functional distribution, and hiring velocity by department — the specific numbers in this post come from there.

You’re not trying to build a spreadsheet. You’re trying to answer one question: is this company’s workforce trending up or down, and in which functions?

The job search version of dividend growth investing

Stop asking: “Who isn’t laying off right now?”

Start asking: “Which companies have been consistently growing headcount — even when the news was bad?”

That’s a different list. It’s a better list. And it’s almost certainly not the list you’re currently working from.

You’re going to spend months targeting somewhere. It should at least be a company that’s actually hiring.