For the man on the deciding side
You have known for weeks. You have told nobody.
Not the team. Not the people it is going to happen to. In a lot of cases not your wife, and not your peers either, because some of them are on the list.
That silence is the part nobody writes about, and it is the part you are actually living.
What the silence does
You find reasons not to walk past certain desks. You are warmer than usual to one man and colder to another, and both of them notice. You rehearse it in the car. You want, badly, to hint at it, so that somebody else is carrying a piece of it with you.
And you delay, and you call the delay diligence.
None of that makes you weak or unfit to be doing the job. It is what weeks of holding something like this does to anyone. It is worth being accurate about, because most of it is visible from the outside.
What it looks like from the other end
James spent more than twenty years as a headhunter in airline, hospitality and travel recruitment — industries where redundancy arrives in waves rather than one at a time. He is the man who rang those people afterwards. Sometimes a week later. Often six months later.
So the one thing this site can tell you is the thing you cannot see from where you are standing: what people said, afterwards, about how it had been done to them. The pattern held across companies and across countries.
The decision itself was almost always forgiven. How they found out was not.
Neither villain nor victim
There are two comfortable positions and both of them are false. The first is that you are a victim of the numbers: you did not choose this, it came from above you, you are only the messenger. The first half of that is often true. It never makes the second half true, because you are still the face they will remember.
The second is that you are the villain. You are not, and nothing here will treat you as one. A man who feels the weight of this is showing the exact thing that will make him do it decently.
If it is happening to you, this is the wrong site
This one is written for the man who has to carry it out. If you are the one being made redundant, or you have been paid and told not to come in, the network has guides written for exactly that, and they are linked at the bottom of this page.
Go there instead. Nothing on this site is addressed to you, and reading it would only tell you what the other man was thinking.
What this site will not do
It gives no employment law and no process. No consultation requirements, no notice periods, no selection criteria or scoring, no severance or settlement terms, no exposure to claims — in any country, including the United Kingdom and Spain, and not if you ask directly. Those are questions for an employment lawyer or a qualified adviser, and getting them wrong is expensive.
Two pages sit either side of the conversation itself. What is already visible is twenty-one ordinary observations about what the room can see and what the silence is doing, with no score and no interpretation. The week after is the part almost nobody writes about: the relief, the building in the first week, which calls come, and what the market hears about you a year later.
It does carry one page of definitions, because being the man who does not know what a word means is its own small humiliation: the words in the room, each one sourced, starting with what the event is called where you are — redundancy, layoff, reduction in force, group termination, retrenchment. What a word means is not what it requires of you, and that distinction is held on the page.
It will not write the conversation for you. No wording, no opening line, no structure, no answers to what they might say. The moment this becomes a script it has become a way of doing it at arm's length, which is the whole thing this site is against.
It will not help you decide who goes, it will not judge anybody you describe, and it will not help you make the act easier to perform. If you are somewhere darker than this page, or the business itself has become the emergency, read the safety page first.
Keeping your thinking
Membership is one annual payment covering the whole network. It gives you a private console that keeps what you write, lets you return to it, and lets you export or delete everything whenever you choose. There is no monthly option and no advertising anywhere in the network.
For this subject in particular: what you write here is not visible to your company, your board or anybody you work with.
Talk it through
The chat is an AI guide, not James replying live, and not a lawyer or an adviser of any kind. It will not give you process, it will not draft anything, and it will not tell you who to select. It can help you be accurate about a decision you are already carrying, and about how you intend to do it.