5 Ways to Use Layoff Data: From Hedge Funds to Newsrooms

WARN Act layoff notices are one of the most underutilized public datasets in the United States. Every day, companies file notices disclosing upcoming layoffs — often 60 days before they happen. Yet most professionals who could benefit from this data don't even know it exists, let alone how to access it.

Here are five real-world ways that organizations use WARN Act data from WARN Firehose to gain competitive advantages.

1. Investment Signals & Hedge Fund Research

For quantitative funds and fundamental investors, WARN data provides early signals about corporate restructuring that often precedes earnings surprises.

Consider: when a major public company files a WARN notice for 2,000 workers across multiple facilities, that restructuring charge will hit their next earnings report. But the WARN notice is filed 60 days earlier — as a public record.

Investment use cases include:

• Earnings surprise prediction — large WARN filings often correlate with restructuring charges
• Industry trend detection — a surge of filings in one sector (e.g., retail, tech) signals broader trouble
• Supply chain intelligence — a supplier's mass layoff may predict production disruptions
• Regional economic indicators — concentrated layoffs in a metro area affect local commercial real estate, consumer spending, and tax revenue

With the WARN Firehose API, quant teams can programmatically pull filings by company, state, industry, and date range — and set up webhooks to get real-time alerts on new filings matching their criteria.

2. Talent Sourcing & Recruiting

When a company files a WARN notice, hundreds or thousands of skilled workers are about to enter the job market. For recruiters and talent acquisition teams, this is a goldmine of timing intelligence.

Instead of competing for passive candidates, recruiters can:

• Target displaced workers proactively — reach out before they're overwhelmed with offers
• Plan hiring events — time job fairs to coincide with major local layoffs
• Understand skill pools — WARN filings include industry and sometimes job categories, helping match displaced talent to open roles
• Build employer brand — companies that help displaced workers find new jobs earn goodwill

Example: A tech company in Austin sees that a competitor just filed a WARN notice for 500 engineers. They can start outreach immediately, weeks before LinkedIn profiles start showing "Open to Work."

3. Investigative Journalism

WARN Act data is a reporter's best friend for labor and business coverage. Filings reveal layoff plans before press releases, and the granular detail (company, location, worker count) enables local and national story angles.

Journalists use WARN data to:

• Break layoff news first — WARN notices are filed before companies issue press releases
• Verify corporate claims — compare what companies say publicly vs. what they file in WARN notices
• Track patterns — identify which industries, regions, or companies are cutting most aggressively
• Quantify impact — provide specific worker counts and locations, not just vague "restructuring" language

Our monthly and weekly reports are also useful starting points for story ideas, with analysis of emerging trends and notable filings.

4. Economic & Academic Research

For economists, labor market researchers, and policy analysts, WARN data provides a granular, real-time view of job destruction that complements aggregate statistics like the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.

Research applications include:

• Recession prediction models — WARN filing velocity as an early indicator
• Geographic labor mobility studies — track where displaced workers end up
• Industry lifecycle analysis — identify which sectors are expanding vs. contracting
• Policy evaluation — assess the effectiveness of retraining programs after mass layoffs
• COVID-19 impact studies — our database captured the full scope of pandemic-era layoffs with 29,392 filings in 2020 alone

Academic and non-profit researchers can access special pricing — contact us for details.

5. Workforce Development & Government Planning

State and local workforce development boards have a legal mandate to provide "rapid response" services to workers affected by mass layoffs. WARN data is their early warning system.

Government use cases include:

• Rapid response coordination — deploy retraining and job placement services before layoffs take effect
• Economic development planning — identify communities at risk from concentrated job losses
• Budget forecasting — predict demand for unemployment insurance, retraining programs, and social services
• Industry attraction — target companies in growing sectors to replace lost employers

With the API's state and city filtering, workforce boards can set up automated monitoring for their jurisdiction and receive alerts on new filings instantly.

Getting Started with the API

All of these use cases are powered by the same API. Here's a quick example — fetching recent California tech layoffs:

GET /api/records?state=CA&industry=Technology&date_from=2026-01-01&format=json

The free tier gives you 100 API calls per day to explore. Paid plans start at $19/month for full access with bulk exports, historical data, and webhook notifications.