Name: How To Quit Your Job
Uploaded: 2026-01-27T13:21:34.000Z
Duration: 12 min 42 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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If you're about to quit your job, you may be wondering what the best way is to do that.

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Well, stick around because in this video I'm going to share with you exactly how you should quit your job in the correct way.

Hey everybody, it's Brian from A Life after layoff.

And today I want to talk to you about how to quit your job in the correct or the most proper way.

Now, as a Corporate recruiter and HR professional with over 20 years of experience interviewing and hiring thousands of people into some of the world's most well known and well respected companies, I know a thing or two about people coming into the organization and people leaving.

And I've been in situations myself where I've been faced with having to quit a job.

So I wanted to talk a little bit about how to quit your job in the most graceful possible way.

Now, if you're interested in more videos directly from a recruiter and HR professional about how to further your career and how to ultimately land your dream job, make sure you hit the subscribe button.

Now, chances are, if you're ready to quit your job, you probably have a very good reason to do so.

Whether it's a promotional opportunity, a way to further your career, or maybe you're just leaving a bad situation.

You want to leave with grace and dignity.

And if you're leaving because you're in a bad situation or toxic work environment and you should be considering leaving, if you're in one of those situations, and

I made a video about that, I'll leave a link for that as well.

The wrong way to quit a job is to storm out of your office, kick your computer over and tell them to take this job and shove it.

And I wish I could queue up that song, but

I'm going to get a copyright strike if I do that.

But the point is, is that that is the wrong way to quit a job.

And really all it's going to do is just land you in a situation where you're not going to be eligible for rehire.

You're going to burn all your bridges, and in some cases you might even end up in jail.

So I would recommend that you don't quit your job in the most spectacular way because the only person that's really going to get satisfaction from that is you.

And that's probably only going to last for about a day or so, because when you really look at it, you're going to be burning a bridge, not just with that employer but with all the people that you were exposed to and even good work friends that you might have had who see you quitting spectacularly, they might think you're a little bit of a risk or a little bit of a loose cannon, and

chances are they're not going to refer you to a future employer.

So if you're unsatisfied with your job, you're unsatisfied with the boss, or you've got a bad situation that you're looking to get out of, I would not recommend telling anybody until you're absolutely ready to move on and find another opportunity.

Because if you come in and tell your boss too soon, you might find yourself in a situation where you're out the door quicker than you anticipated.

It's really better to go out on your own terms.

And the old adage is it's a lot easier to find a job when you have a job than to be looking as an unemployed person.

And once you do have another job lined up, I would strongly recommend that you have all of your ducks in a row before you give your two weeks notice or you quit.

Make sure that you have a drug screen done, make sure that you have and your results are back.

Make sure that you have your background checks, make sure you have your drug screens, any of your references, all of the stuff that you need to do from a pre employment perspective, make sure you've got that all set up.

And make sure you have a confirmed start date before you go in and give notice, because you don't want to.

I've seen cases where somebody gives a notice too soon, they get an offer, they go off and give notice and then something comes up on their background and we actually have to pull an offer.

And now they've indicated to their current employer that they are leaving and we have to pull the offer.

I've actually had to make that phone call.

So I always tell my candidates when they receive an offer and they say, well, when should I give my notice?

You know your situation as well as anybody.

But I always recommend, just to be safe, make sure you have all those things back.

Because in a lot of cases it can take several weeks.

If you move to a bunch of different places, you're on a background check.

They actually, the background company has to call up the different courthouses and they have, depending on the courthouse that you're in or how many locations you lived in.

It can take quite a while to get your information back, your background check back.

They've kind of things are pretty decent now, but

I've seen them in some cases hung up for a few weeks.

So I always just recommend have a confirmed start date, have a green light from the company that you're moving to and they're going to respect the fact that you want that all back before you give a two weeks notice.

So I would recommend highly that you wait until you've got that confirmed start date.

I know when you're interviewing it can seem very tempting to go off and tell work friends that you maybe work really closely with, that you get excited about and you want to share the news with.

I would recommend that you keep your mouth shut, zipped, very tight lipped, even to your closest work friends because at the end of the day if the rumor gets out, if it slips, it could come back and bite you.

And if something again something happens, I think it's better to be in the, in the driver's seat.

Keep it very professional and above the cuff.

Don't let anybody know that you're looking.

And then as soon as you get the opportunity, there's a proper channel to go through that you want to follow.

You don't want to start going up and putting it through the rumor mill and your boss be the last one to find out.

Now the next step is once you have that confirmed start date is to set a meeting with your boss.

I would suggest that you do this face to face or zoom call depending on your work situation.

But I would not send an email or a text message to deliver this message.

But basically what I would do is I would give them kind of the minimum that they need to know and it depends on your relationship with your boss and really why you're leaving.

If it's a really toxic situation, you may just want to keep it to a.

Hey, I just wanted to let you know that I've got another opportunity that came my way and it's really the best move for my family.

I just wanted to thank you for all the time, but

I am giving my two weeks notice so keep it short, sweet, kind of to the point.

Don't start going into I'm quitting because you're a bad boss.

I'm quitting because of this, this and this.

Because it's not going to get you anywhere.

It's going to create a situation where there might be a powder keg and emotions are going to boil.

So you want to kind of go in as emotion zero point as you possibly can because your decision should be already made in your mind.

Or if you looked at my other video about counteroffers, we're not going to entertain counteroffers anyway.

So we are basically just going to cut baits.

And at your point, at this point in the process, you've already made your decision, you're already gone.

There's no satisfaction in telling them to F off or flip the bird and kick over their desk, you know, kick the plant over, planter over as you're walking out the door.

That's really not going to get you anything other than that minute of satisfaction and a lifetime of reputation.

So at this point, just take the high road, be the professional in the situation and give you two weeks notice.

Be very courtesy, give a high degree of courtesy.

Thank them for their time, thank them for the opportunity and leave and give your two weeks.

And chances are the boss, if they want to just cut bait, they'll cut bait with you right there.

And you have a little two week vacation that you can enjoy before you start your new opportunity.

Don't go telling everybody around the water cooler that you're leaving.

And the boss hears about it through the third through the grapevine, because they will hear about it through the grapevine, trust me on that.

Let them know first and then ask them their opinion.

Okay, now that I've given you my two weeks notice, I would like to start sharing with my teams to start putting together a transition plan.

And your boss is probably going to work with you on that as well.

Say, okay, how can we transition things away from your desk?

So at that point then I would ask the boss like, hey, when is a good, good time for me to start letting my co workers and my clients or customers know that I'm going to be leaving and then wait for them to give you the green light because you want to follow the proper protocol, because you want to leave a good impression on your boss or the team that surrounds them or it's even the boss's boss in some cases.

You want to have a reputation of being somebody that handled it properly because you never know what's going to come down in the future.

So make sure that you get blessing before you start telling people and that way there's no surprises, there's no kind of hurt feelings, there's not going to be any animosity built up in that regard.

And when you do have clients and co workers that you got to keep in mind, mind when you're leaving, you're going to be leaving a void of work.

And if you've got co workers that you work very closely with, suddenly their workloads are going to go up.

And while they may be happy for you that you got a different opportunity, they're going to suffer in the meantime.

Same thing with clients, same thing with internal customers.