When news broke earlier this month that Education Management Corp. had handed layoff notices to 115 employees at Art Institute campuses across the country — including 10 in Pittsburgh — the first reports weren’t found in a newspaper or television broadcast.

And they certainly did not come from the company. 

Rather, EDMC employees and observers were taking the for-profit education company to task at their computers and mobile devices, posting a flurry of speculative comments on an anonymous online forum born in dire economic depths of the Great Recession.

By the time a spokesman verified the layoffs in official news reports, users had fanned rumors for three days with scores of posts on TheLayoff.com. 

Like comments on any anonymous forum, such posts can’t be treated as gospel. But TheLayoff.com has nonetheless boomed as a virtual gathering place for workers looking to piece together what is really going on as their employer struggles. And just as crowd sourcing has taken over as a way to assemble everything from funding to innovating products, it also has allowed valuable bits of insider information from employees or disgruntled managers to do just that.

Sites like TheLayoff.com present a new challenge to a business manager’s most private and sensitive tasks. Terminating employment, much like hiring, is a process over which an employer wants total control, said Sachi Barreiro, a legal editor who covers employment issues for Nolo Press, which has published a guide on how to conduct a layoff.  

“I think the most important thing in the layoff is to do it in a respectful and humane way, and that’s in face-to-face, one-on-one meetings,” Ms. Barreiro said.

Finding out you’ve been fired from an incendiary online blog, she said, is about the worst possible way to do that.

TheLayoff.com was established in January 2009 as a pet project with the intent to publicize information about layoffs happening during the Great Recession, according to an email from its founder, who would not give his or her name.

“There was a need and the site was created to meet it,” the founder wrote. “It’s as simple as that.”

As of early October, the site had more than 5,000 company entries, mostly publicly traded businesses. About a dozen or so companies receive daily comments — big players such as ConocoPhilips, Baker Hughes, Qualcomm. The traffic tends to fluctuate based on what layoffs are happening on a given day, making it somewhat of a harbinger for the larger economy.

“Initially we had minimal traffic, but interest increased lately and now we have a few thousand visits every day,” the owner stated.

Though it may not be a household name, TheLayoff.com is among the top sites when one enters a major company’s name and the word “layoff.”

It’s not difficult to see how a concerned employee searching for answers could land there and contribute to the situation spiraling out of control.

“Rumors have always been a big challenge for employers when it comes to layoffs,” Ms. Barreiro said. “With these types of websites, rumors spread a lot faster and a lot wider. Employees do have new challenges today.”

It’s particularly an issue at companies such as EDMC, she said, that are spread out across dozens of Art Institute locations from California to Florida to New York. The Pittsburgh company cut relatively few positions at several locations in the recent layoff, so the total magnitude wasn’t apparent until the string of postings started to pile up.  

To keep with best practices, Ms. Barreiro recommended companies task more executives or managers to carry out the firings. That way, the layoffs can be coordinated quickly, while employees still are afforded personal meetings and time to ask questions.

It’s also advisable to draw up a contingency plan if rumors start leaking, Ms. Barreiro said, so managers aren’t unprepared to respond. 

“It’s really important to come up with an overarching plan, because you want to keep it contained,” she said.

But if news gets out, “In many cases, it’s best to jump in front of it, to move up your timeline and give employees a heads up.”

Daniel Moore: dmoore@post-gazette.com, 412-263-2743 and Twitter @PGdanielmoore.

First Published: October 11, 2015, 4:00 a.m.