Bailey Harris, 25, worked as a recruiter for a big tech company for more than a year and a half before she was laid off in January. After the initial shock wore off, she decided to tell her story three days later on TikTok. “I was never really worried about layoffs,” she said in the video, which she recorded from a car. “I just didn’t see this coming,” she added.
It was only the second TikTok video Ms. Harris had ever made, but within a day it had more than 100,000 views. That number has since quadrupled.
She continued to post about being newly unemployed. In one, she shared how she was saving money. In another, she told her viewers about a new side hustle helping a friend flip real estate. (These videos performed much better than the others she later posted, which focused on topics like dating, fitness and nutrition.)
“I was like, ‘This is relevant — why not speak about it because I know a lot of people have been going through the same thing?’” she said. The videos, she continued, were “getting a lot of comments about how people like my attitude toward my situation.”
