The WARN act requires U.S employers over a certain size to report layoffs to their state government. Every state has a different system of collecting and publishing these, so we made an aggregator.
The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act of 1988 is a US labor law which protects employees, their families, and communities by requiring most employers with 100 or more employees to provide 60 calendar-day advance notification of plant closings and mass layoffs of employees, as defined in the Act.
If you try to find the data from state government websites, its... an adventure. Some states you have to actually email someone, and they email you a zip file with an excel sheet inside it. Others publish PDFs on the state website for each individual notice. The most progressive state is Colorado, which just has a public Google Sheet.
At Drafted we have a project called Layoffs.tech which notifies people every week of layoffs in the news, but those tend to only be the "big ticket" layoffs e.g Uber / Airbnb etc. So I set out on a quest to see if you can get more granular data, and this is the result.
Most likely this data isn't very useful for recruiters, since there's a very long publishing delay - you're more likely to hear about these layoffs in the news before they show up in the data. But this could be a useful dataset for academics, researchers, sales and marketing. We made it free for non-commercial use, and you can also buy a commercial license if you like. If you're a Product Hunter I'll hook you up.
Shoutout to Ash and Yasser at Polymer Search, who helped bring to life the interactive exploring of the data without having to write extra code :)
US Layoffs Explorer
US Layoffs Explorer