January 2008 – Water Well Journal

NEWS & EVENTS — ARTICLES:

January 2008 – Water Well Journal

Helping Bridge a Gap
Try to tailor outplacement to fit your employees – and your budget.

As the economy weakens, outplacement of terminated employees will once again move to the forefront of human resource management in many companies.

There is a misconception that outplacement is no longer needed. The thinking is that many people have been downsized, outplaced, resized and restructured, so they have gone through outplacement services at lease once already. There is some truth to this, but what doesn’t change is the trauma associated with losing your job, the fear associated with not having a paycheck, and the hard work it takes to get another job.

Today, companies are providing the basics—call it Outplacement 101. This includes a group workshop teaching “candidates” (as they are called) the how to’s of writing a resume, putting together a 30-second speech of who you are and what you do, building your networking list, and so on. The “Big Three” outplacement firms (Right Management, Lee Hecht Harrison, and Drake Beam Morin) also offer online services, webcasts, e-mail coaching and other technology-based resources.

But what do terminated employees really need? They need human contact – real live people who are local to the market and who have contacts that can be shared. The higher up the organizational ladder people are, the harder it is to get reemployed. The air is a little thinner and there are fewer executive jobs openings. Executives need specialty services that include helping them think through broader possibilities as it relates to their career. Maybe executives want “nextplacement” (what should be my next steps at this point in my career and my life?) instead of a replacement job (doing the same thing the same way, only at a different organization).

With the aging of the baby boomers, many are looking for holistic change, not just job change, and are asking for help that is about total life transformation. Many of these people are at senior levels and executive services should no longer be about program length, but more about personal service that is specific to their lives, dreams, finances, and family situation.

To get this level of service, companies and individuals are going back to the small boutique specialty firms as opposed to the “cookie cutter” executive services that big global firms are forced to provide in order to be scalable. As a result, a resurgence of small personal boutique firms is happing and companies should become familiar with who they are in their respective marketplaces.

Teresa Daly is a Managing Partner of Navigate Forward, Inc., a consulting firm that specializes in executive transition services.