The biggest talent shift in three years is happening right now. Most founders are on holiday.
Let's start with the numbers, because they're hard to ignore.
Tech layoffs in 2026 have already passed the whole of last year. Over 170,000 people cut so far, and the rounds are getting bigger - Oracle let 21,000 people go in June alone. Block cut 40% of its workforce in one move. More than half of this year's layoff announcements explicitly cite AI as a driving factor.
You can read that as a grim story about the industry. Or you can read it the way I do: the largest release of talent into the market since 2023 is happening right now, in real time.
People who were unreachable eighteen months ago - locked into golden handcuffs, buried in big-company comfort, ignoring every message - are suddenly answering. Some are on the market involuntarily. Many more are watching colleagues get cut and quietly deciding they'd rather jump than wait.
For a Seed-to-Series B founder, this is the best buying window in years. But only if you play it properly - because there's a catch, and most founders are about to get it wrong in one of two directions.
Mistake one: ignoring the wave
Some founders will look at laid-off candidates and quietly discount them. If they were any good, they wouldn't have been cut, right?
Wrong. And this thinking will cost you.
Look at how these layoffs are actually happening. Entire divisions closed. Whole product lines killed. Twenty per cent of a company gone in a single announcement. When Oracle cuts 21,000 people, that's not performance management - that's a strategy change. Exceptional people get caught in these waves all the time, for reasons that have nothing to do with their ability.
Some of the best candidates I've placed were people who got cut in a restructure. They came with something extra, too - a point to prove. That energy, channelled into the right role, is worth more than another line on a CV.
If your instinct is to filter out anyone with a recent layoff on their profile, you're screening out some of the strongest and most motivated people in the market. That's the same wishlist thinking I wrote about in May - judging the paper instead of the person.
Mistake two: hiring the logo
The opposite trap is just as dangerous - and honestly, I see it more often.
A founder sees a CV land in their inbox with a massive tech brand on it. Ten years at a company everyone's heard of. Impressive titles. Their eyes light up. This is the calibre we've been waiting for.
Slow down.
Big-company pedigree does not automatically translate to startup. In fact, it often works against you. Someone who spent a decade inside a machine with infinite resources, specialist teams for everything and three layers of process between them and a decision can find a fifteen-person startup genuinely disorientating. No platform team. No design system. No one to hand things off to. Just problems, ambiguity and a founder expecting output.
Some big-company people make that jump brilliantly. Many don't. The logo tells you nothing about which one you're looking at.
What tells you is how they operated inside that company. Did they build things from nothing, or maintain things that existed? Did they work close to the edge - new products, small teams, undefined problems - or deep in the core, where everything was already decided? Do they talk about what they shipped, or what their team owned? Ask what they did when something broke and nobody was coming to fix it.
Hire the builder, not the badge.
Who to actually go after
From what I'm seeing across my searches right now, the profiles worth moving on fall into three groups.
The caught-in-the-wave builders. People with genuine startup DNA who took a big-company role in the last few years for stability or comp, and just got released. They know how to build, they've now seen how big companies operate, and they're often actively relieved to be out. These are the best value in the market right now.
The watchers. Not laid off - but watching it happen around them. Survivor unease is real. Their loyalty to the company that just cut their team is gone, and they're quietly open in a way they weren't six months ago. This group won't apply to anything. You have to go to them. But they're more reachable now than they've been in years.
The AI-displaced with transferable depth. A lot of these cuts are AI-driven restructures. Some of the people released have deep expertise in exactly the things startups need - data, infrastructure, ML operations - and are being let go because of a strategy pivot, not a skills gap. Founders who can look past the "displaced by AI" framing will find serious capability at accessible prices.
Why you need to move now, not in September
Here's the timing part most founders will miss, and it matters more than everything above.
It's August. Half the market assumes hiring is dead until September. Candidates pause their searches. Founders push processes to "after the summer." Everyone logs off.
That's exactly why you shouldn't.
The candidates who are active right now - including thousands of recently released, genuinely strong people - are facing almost no competition for attention. Your message doesn't drown in a flooded inbox. Your process gets their full focus. The hiring managers who are around have the time to actually engage.
Then September arrives, and everyone floods back at once. Every founder who "waited until after summer" starts their search on the same Monday. Every candidate who paused reactivates. Your carefully crafted outreach becomes one of forty in an inbox.
The founders who run processes in August close in September while everyone else is still scheduling first rounds. The window is now - and this year, with this much talent in motion, it's the widest it's been in a long time.
The August playbook: 3 things to do this month
1. Reopen your "impossible" list.
Every founder has a mental list of people they'd love to hire but assumed they couldn't get - too senior, too comfortable, too expensive, too settled. The market just changed. Go through that list this week and reach out to every one of them. The worst case is the same no you already had. The best case is a conversation that was impossible in January.
2. Rewrite your outreach for the moment.
If you're messaging recently laid-off candidates, drop the standard pitch. Acknowledge nothing about the layoff - nobody wants to be approached as a charity case. Lead with why them specifically, what you're building, and what they'd own. Respect and specificity close this group. Pity repels them.
3. Run one full process before September 1st.
Pick your most important open role and commit to running it properly this month - outreach this week, interviews within two, decision inside 30 days. You'll have candidates' full attention, minimal competition, and an offer signed while your competitors are writing their September job posts.
What I'm seeing from my desk
The quality of available candidates right now is the highest I've seen in three years. Profiles that would have ignored every message in 2024 are actively exploring. Comp expectations have rationalised too - not collapsed, but the fantasy numbers of the peak are gone. The gap between what strong people cost and what they're worth hasn't been this favourable for a long time.
Founders are still moving too slowly for this market. The strongest released candidates are gone within two to three weeks - they're being picked up fast by the companies who understand the moment. If your process takes six weeks, you're interviewing the people the fast movers passed on.
The "laid off" stigma is dead among the founders who know what they're doing. The sharpest founders I work with don't even blink at a layoff on a CV anymore. They know how these cuts work. The ones still treating it as a red flag are quietly handing their competitors the best people in the market.
Tools
DM me on LinkedIn with any of these and I'll send them straight over:
SCORECARD - A 5-line role scorecard template. Forces clarity on what the hire actually needs to deliver.
LOOP - A structured interview loop framework. Who interviews, what each stage tests, how to avoid asking the same thing four times.
OFFER - A checklist for making offers that stick. Comp, work model, timeline, and the soft stuff most founders forget.
Because great teams are Built Different
Hiring question? Building a key team? DM me - always happy to think it through with you.