My 33-year-old wife was laid off about 3 months ago, and today her severance officially ended.
She was working as an AVP-level Engineering & Facilities leader at Fidelity, handling ~2 million sq ft across APAC, leading 80+ engineers and 15+ managers. Before that, she worked with companies like Synopsys, Knight Frank, and CBRE, and was even directly absorbed by a client based on her performance.
I’m adding this context because I’ve seen people underestimate Facilities Management as a field. It’s not just “maintenance”, it involves:
- Managing business-critical environments with near 99.9% uptime
- Handling multi-crore CAPEX/OPEX budgets
- Leading sustainability transformations (she drove 95%+ green energy adoption)
- Delivering large-scale projects (400k+ sq ft campuses, LEED-certified sites)
- Managing risk, compliance, audits, and business continuity
Despite this, we’ve applied to hundreds of roles via LinkedIn, referrals, portals, premium subscriptions, AI bots (I am in IT), but all we get are generic rejection emails or no response at all.
To be transparent, part of the issue at her last job was:
- She didn’t play office politics
- The daily commute expected was Electronic City → Manyata Tech Park (~80 km round trip), which wasn’t sustainable. We have 2 kids.
She even had a strong lead with her previous boss (from before Fidelity), but unfortunately he got laid off during reorg.
Now she’s extremely stressed, and honestly, it’s hard seeing someone at that level struggle just to get an interview.
I’m not asking for favors or referrals blindly — just trying to understand:
- Is the market this bad for senior roles in Facilities / Workplace / Infra?
- Are we positioning her profile wrong?
- Are companies silently filtering out candidates for reasons we’re not seeing?
If anyone here works in Real Estate, Facilities, Workplace Strategy, or related leadership roles — I’d really appreciate your perspective.
Even a reality check would help.