Millennial loses three jobs in three years, then makes one big change

A woman who lost three jobs in three years flipped the script by helping others going through unemployment, and she gave Newsweek an inspiring account what became a deeply rewarding full-time occupation.

Giovanna Ventola, 34, lives in Charleston, South Carolina, and had a background as a ballet dancer and in the arts before moving into the corporate world with commercial real estate in Chicago.

But when she lost three jobs in three years, due to layoffs and through no fault of her own, she found herself in a dark place.

“The first time I lost my job in 2020, right before the election. I got a new job like seven months later, which was great, and I was there almost two years and then lost my job a second time,” she told Newsweek.

When she got a third job, she was there for only 90 days before they announced layoffs, with Ventola finding she had lost her job the night before Thanksgiving 2023.

The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic caused massive layoffs, with the unemployment rate at 14.8 percent in April 2020. The job market has recovered to 4.1 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but some states still have a higher rate of unemployment, including 5.3 percent in Illinois, 5.7 percent in Nevada, and 5.4 percent in California.

Ventola says she had been “naive and optimistic” with her first layoff, but when the third time came, she began wondering: “Is this a me problem? Is this market problem, is it an industry problem?”

Repeatedly reaching out to her network for help finding new jobs, only to be laid off not long later and reaching out to the same people, made her “internalize it,” with Ventola admitting it was a “struggle.”

Ventola took a different approach, and began sharing her unemployment experience on TikTok, where she met others going through the same thing, and built a community where they help each other with résumés, interview preparations, and workshops. It has now become a fully-fledged network, which she called Rhize.

And on the night before Thanksgiving 2024, she shared a video to her account @giovanna.ventola where she reflected on how far she’s come.

“Today marks the one-year anniversary of me losing my job for the third time in three years,” she began. “But I’m gonna flip it around and talk about the good things that have happened.”

She acknowledged she became “super desperate and depressed” which was “dark,” —but from reaching out to others in the months after her layoff, the Rhize community now has 3,000 members.

“I’m helping people find jobs, and it’s very cute and it’s very fun, and I never would have been here without that job loss, that awful experience.”

“Especially during this Thanksgiving time, I look at this year that I would call a train wreck, and I find so many beautiful things because of this community.”

“Watching people help each other and help themselves every day is one of the things that got me through one of the most challenging things in my life,” she said, adding she learned there was “more out there than what I was living, because of all the people in Rhize.”

She told Newsweek her first TikTok showcased an email template that she uses to apply for jobs, and was astounded when “a bunch” of people got in touch to ask for the template. She kept it going, urged people to get in touch to share their job-hunting stories together, and set up a Slack channel where people could join and help each other.

As the community grew, they set up website Rhizetogether.com, and had unemployed graphic artists volunteer to create the logo to add to their portfolio, and set up workshops to assist people in job hunting.

And in July of this year, she stopped looking for jobs altogether, focusing solely on Rhize, where there are over 3,000 people in their Slack channel.

“It’s free, which is always going to be a thing. You can’t charge people who are struggling, I just don’t believe in it,” Ventola told Newsweek. “I’m not going to promote products or career coaches that are going to charge people thousands of dollars.”

As for advice to someone going through unemployment, she told them: “Trust your struggle.”

“It’s not like, ‘enjoy the struggle’, or ‘everything happens for a reason’,” she explained. “You’re struggling. Trust it for now. It’s not going to be forever. Trust what’s going on. I try not to do toxic positivity, the last thing people need is people to be super positive when you’re struggling.

“People can share their struggles [in Rhize] and we allow them to vent, but we ask how can we make this better for you and anyone else dealing with it?”