After a successful summer internship at a mortgage technology company, Alana Klopstein was thrilled to receive a job offer.

She signed the contract in January 2022, giving her peace of mind during her senior year at UCSD. Then in June, three months before her start date, she received an email from the company. The report stated that the market downturn forced the company to make tough decisions. Show has been cancelled.

“It was really devastating,” said Klopstein, 22, who lives in San Diego. “I had a vision of what my life would look like, and what kind of adjustments I would have to make to transition into the working world after I had been through so many years of schooling, and that wasn’t a thing anymore.”

As technology companies and other companies thousands of layoffs, Some also cancel job offers—sometimes just days before the start date and long after prospective employees have moved on or restructured their lives. Cancellations of shows are not as widespread as layoffs, but the practice can grow if it is The economy is heading into recession.

“If the economy is where people think it’s going to be, and we’re in the middle of a real recession, I expect you’ll see an impact on graduating college students and business school graduates,” said Dan Kaplan, senior client partner. At Korn Ferry, a management consulting firm.

Companies usually cancel shows when “a shock hits the system,” such as the 2000 internet crash, market jitters after 9/11 or the 2008 recession, he said. More recently, companies canceled shows at the start of the pandemic when there was widespread uncertainty about the future.

Today, months-long fears of a recession, combined with turmoil in industries like crypto, financial services, and technology, have led to this latest round of canceled shows that mostly affected entry-level and mid-career jobs.

Jamie Cohn, director of research for human resources practices at consulting firm Gartner, said of the hiring practices of companies as the pandemic eases.

With the market slow to recover, companies don’t see that growth on the horizon. They’re starting to think maybe it’ll be a few more years before they get to where they thought they’d be now,” Cohn said.

Zening Zhao, 24, had interned at tech companies but began hearing rumors of layoffs or hiring freezes as he neared graduation. A job in finance seemed more stable, so he accepted a job as a Python software developer at a trading firm in Chicago.

After graduating in December from the University of Washington, Chow packed up his life in Seattle, moved in and signed a lease on a new apartment. Five days before his start date, he received a call from his employer telling him to rescind his offer due to cuts in company expenses.

“I felt hopeless at that moment,” Zhao said. “I have prepared everything for the job. It is the darkest day of my life so far.”

Although the business company paid $10,000 in moving costs for Zahau, high rent in Chicago forced him to leave town, return to Seattle, and stay with a friend. He now faces a tough job market full of out-of-work engineers — after submitting more than 100 job applications, he has received only a handful of responses.

This experience made him more wary of final job offers. Cohn of Gartner said that level of skepticism may bode well for companies later on. She said that job candidates now say they don’t trust companies to be honest with them during the hiring process, and are more likely to relish other job offers after they’ve already accepted them.

“Things like layoffs and canceled shows amplify the way trust is broken,” Cohn said.

Rejecting candidates with little interest in future relationships can also affect companies’ hiring. Good talent talks to other good talent, and such actions can give companies a black eye. On the other hand, helping potential employees get new services is a goodwill gesture that can leave a positive impression on the candidates.

After interviewing with two companies, Evan Patterson got job offers that were then rescinded that same week. But the founders of both startups said they would pass on his resume and share his content with their networks in hopes of helping him find another gig. These connections are now helping him in his current job search.

“They were just decent human beings in response, and that was more than I could ask for,” said Patterson, 28, who lives in Chicago and does marketing to community influencers and startups for software companies. “I told them even in two, three, four years, things might change, tap my shoulder.”

Mita paid Nour Abdellatif six weeks worth of salary when the social media giant rescinded her job offer last spring for a remote recruiter job. Although she was crushed that the job didn’t work out, the payment gave her a higher say in the company.

“They knew that people depended their lives on it, and that was unheard of,” said Abdul Latif, 32, of Severn, Maryland.

By September, I got a new job as an employee in an engineering firm. The annual salary is $20,000 less than she would have earned at Mita, she said, but her new employer has never laid off workers during recessions in its 30-year history.

“This was my main goal – to settle for a high wage,” said Abdul Latif.

The number of shows canceled today is “nowhere near the levels we’ve seen before,” said Kaplan of Korn Ferry, because companies usually have other options to take advantage of before pulling offers, such as reducing bonuses or laying off workers.

“You spend a lot of time and energy to bring people to your company, and the worst thing you can do is go back to them and take it back,” he said. “Companies are really trying to avoid it.”

But when they happen, it’s essential to reach out to your networks, whether it’s LinkedIn, an alumni association, or an industry-specific group.

Isa Goldberg received hundreds of comments and supportive messages from contacts on LinkedIn after she posted her experience of getting a healthcare consultant job offer that got canceled just six days before her start date.

“I was blown away,” Goldberg, 27, who lives in Brooklyn, said of the cancellation. “It took me an hour just to cry, have an emotional, come-down-to-earth moment and realize what was going on.”

The company offered to pay her $5,000 or let her stay in the pool of job applicants until January, when she would likely have a job opening. I tried negotiating for a higher payment but it didn’t work.

Goldberg ended up breaking her New York City lease, moving in with the family to save money and look for a new opportunity. I found one in three weeks, thanks to a referral from a college friend.

“It’s definitely a shock when you think you’re on the diving board of your career, and you jump right back in and end up with a shallower bottom than you’d hoped,” Goldberg said.

But she said, “The benefit of having a strong, supportive network outweighs the momentary discomfort of having a canceled show. Let people help you right away.”

Alana Klopstein is considering careers outside of the tech industry while continuing her job search.

(Sandy Huffaker / For The Times)

Klopstein, from San Diego, is still looking for a job in software engineering. The past few months have been grueling, with interviews that go nowhere, radio silence after applications are submitted and emails saying companies are no longer hiring.

She considers getting a part-time job outside of tech just to get by so she can find something. But she tries to remain optimistic.

“It’s definitely a tough market,” Klopstein said. “Fortunately, some friends have found things, and it gives me hope that something is waiting for me in the near future.”