Recruiters now source from a laid-off Grubhub worker's self-built alumni tracker

The feature that turned a list into a sourcing channel was sorting. Katie Cavote, a former recruiter at Grubhub who did not know Thevaranjan while the two worked there, said she advised him on how to make the network more attractive for recruiters at other companies to use ^[17]. Hiring managers tend to look for candidates from a specific company or with a specific background, Cavote said, and the tracker sorts laid-off workers by specialty to make that easier ^[18]. "Recruiters are getting creative these days in finding the right talent," she said ^[19].

Thevaranjan said he drew on his skills as an auditor to build the list, then tagged some of Grubhub's executives in a LinkedIn post days after the layoffs to get more eyes on it ^[15]. "I call it the empathy window, this short period of time where people feel bad for you," he said ^[16]. He recalled introducing a laid-off colleague to a recruiter at Reddit, where he had previously interviewed, the same day they were laid off ^[13].

Most of these groups do not last. Many laid-off workers fall back on their own contacts, or on a group chat of fellow laid-off employees that goes dark after a month or two ^[9]. This one has run for a year and a half and lists 326 alumni looking for work, most of whom have found new jobs according to the tracker itself ^[6]. If "most" means at least half, that is 164 placements ^[26]. C.J. Cross, who worked in workforce analytics at Grubhub, was cut in the same 2025 layoffs and started at Uber that summer on a referral from the network ^[20]. Uber laid him off earlier this month and he rejoined ^[21]. "The very first thing I did was go back to the Grubhub group chat," he said ^[22].

Thevaranjan said he got the idea from Kristen Ubaldi, then chief people officer at Groupon, who built a similar list and promoted it with the help of Groupon's executives after the company's 2020 layoffs ^[12]. So the choice in front of a people leader planning a reduction is about ownership. A company-run list buys goodwill and a rehire pipeline, and it also publishes a filterable roster of your former staff, sorted by specialty, during the exact weeks rival recruiters find them cheapest to reach ^[18][16].

Paul de Lucena, a former Grubhub employee and network member, said "Irvin makes it his personal mission to get everybody employed" ^[7]. Single-owner networks concentrate risk in one administrator, and access here runs through a Google Form that Thevaranjan and other administrators review ^[11].

Business Insider's account does not include a comment from Grubhub or the terms it offered laid-off staff, so a direct comparison with the network is not available on this record ^[28]. Former Grubhub employees and others who interacted with the network described it as a grassroots effort to provide the support that is typically lacking after a layoff ^[25]. Anne Stamer, a career transition coach who led webinars for the group, said big sites like LinkedIn offer plenty of connections but can be overwhelming to work into a strategy. "It's a double-edged sword," she said ^[23][24].

Layoffs at Amazon, Meta and Uber this year mean more of these cohorts are forming without a company sponsor ^[8]. At Grubhub, the people who decide who gets listed are Thevaranjan and his fellow administrators ^[11].