A round of layoffs isn’t one candidate, it’s a team — and the good ones are gone from the market fast, usually inside two to three weeks. Connect Lusha to Claude and this prompt checks your target companies for recent headcount decline, finds who’s affected in your target function, and sorts them by how close they are to your open profile.
The prompt
Here are companies I want to check for recent layoffs: [paste company
names or domains, or ask Claude to find companies in [target industry]
with recent headcount decline].
Using the Lusha connector, confirm which of these companies show a
headcount drop in the last 60 days, then find people who left in a
[target role, e.g. product design or data engineering] function around
that time. Return a table with name, last title, company, tenure, and
when they left.
Then flag two groups:
(1) left in the last 21 days - still actively looking, call first
(2) left 22 to 60 days ago - may already have offers in motion,
worth a try but lower priority
Finish with the top five profiles closest to my target role and a
one-line reason for each.
What you’ll get back
The situation: a recruiter hiring product designers pastes eight companies in their target industry known for recent cuts and asks Lusha to confirm and find affected designers.
The output:
Example outputs in this play are illustrative — they reflect the structure, fields, and format of real Lusha connector output, but were not pulled from a live session. Run the prompt with your own data and connectors to see live results.
Why it works
Layoffs are visible in the data before they’re visible on LinkedIn — a company-level headcount drop is a signal Lusha can confirm directly, and the individual departures that follow carry tenure and title data that let Claude rank who’s the closest match to an open role. The two of them together turn a headline about cuts at a company into a ranked call list in one pass. Contact data is verified across multiple sources and handled under GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2 Type II, and ISO 27701 compliance, with opt-outs honored automatically.
FAQ
Why does the window close around 21 days?
It’s not a hard cutoff, but it tracks the real pattern: strong candidates from a well-known layoff get scooped up fast, often inside three weeks, because every recruiter watching that space saw the same headline. Past that point, treat outreach as a lower-odds attempt, not a dead end.
How do I find companies with layoffs if I don’t already have a list?
Ask Claude to widen the first step: search for companies in your target industry or size range with recent headcount decline, using the Lusha connector, before running the rest of the prompt. It can build the company list and the candidate list in the same conversation.
Is this different from the competitor talent moves play?
That play tracks steady departures at a named competitor set over 90 days, useful for ongoing monitoring. This one is built around a single triggering event — a confirmed layoff — and moves faster and narrower: days, not a quarter, and the company itself is the signal, not just the individual moves.
Is it appropriate to source people this way after a layoff?
Recruiters reaching out to people who were laid off is a normal, generally welcomed part of the job market — most candidates in this position want to hear from recruiters. The prompt reads business-profile changes, the same information visible on a public profile; it doesn’t reveal anything about the layoff itself beyond what the company or the individual has already made public.
What if a company’s headcount data hasn’t updated yet?
Company-level records can lag a few days behind individual departures. If the company search doesn’t show a drop yet but you have reason to believe a layoff happened, search directly for recent departures in your target function at that company instead — the individual records often update first.
