No one wants to be let go, laid off, or downsized from their job. For many people, their career means a lot to them and is something they wanted to do for a long time. For others, it represents a lifeline to supporting their family and living a good life. Unfortunately, when the economy turns sour and businesses begin to struggle, they have to start making difficult decisions about doing layoffs. A layoff can be psychologically troubling for the employee who is laid off. That’s why if they lose any quality organization to offer with a severance package. Outplacement is one of the best things to offer an affected employee. Here is a quick guide to offering outplacement services for affected staff at your business.
Outplacement Defined
The term “outplacement” is relatively new, only going back to the early 20th century. But what it means is still as relevant today as it was then. An outplacement service assists a former employee of a company with finding a new job/career. They accomplish this through career coaching, access to special job boards, training, resume prep, salary negotiation, and personalized assistance. It acts as a transitional point for the employee from one job to the other and reduces stress on them as they seek new employment. For the employer, it’s a way to show they care about their staff.
Reasons To Offer Outplacement
If you’re wondering why you should offer career outplacement to any affected employees, look no further than it being a Goodwill gesture toward the employees showing them that you still care about them even after they’ve left the organization. Since a good out placement service can actually help an employee land a new rule quickly, you’re essentially setting up your affected staff for positive results. You can also gain quick insight into how well the outplacement services are doing in getting them into a new job through analytics, showing you the value of the service. There are other reasons to offer it as well. Imagine the scenario where you’ve laid off an employee but haven’t taken any care to help them after letting them go. That employee is probably going to be angry and air their grievances on social media sites like facebook, twitter, and glass door. This could have a detrimental effect on your future candidates. It can also significantly damage the morale of existing staff. Existing / remaining staff members might wonder who’s going to be laid off next. This can really damage productivity and general reputation. Finally, there can be legal repercussions in or unemployment claims down the line that outplacement can help prevent.
Technology and Innovation
One of the reasons some modern outplacement firms have such high success rates is because they embrace technology rather than eschew it. With the world increasingly turning toward remote work and technology based applications for jobs, it makes sense to tailor career coaching and outplacement services to these options. Teleconferencing or video chats also let candidates receive all the benefits of outplacement without having to leave their homes or travel very far. It’s more convenient for the candidate to find new work while also proving the service is not stuck in the past. Finding innovative and unique approaches to helping candidates is what a good out placement service does, so being able to leverage modern technology is critical for the process to achieve the kind of results/support that recently laid off candidates need to land a new job.
Candidate Focused
A good out placement service will always be focused on helping the candidate achieve their goal of finding a new job quickly. Whether it’s through focused career coaching, developing/honing new interview skills, preparing them for how to write cover letters, or personalized searching the service has to focus on the candidates to achieve results. If the service isn’t helping those candidates find new work quickly, they simply won’t find new work. Since the goal of many companies today is to attract and retain high quality talent, using out placement seems like a great way to accomplish that goal.
Resumes and Career Coaching
In the world of outplacement, a career coach helps candidates learn new skills, find potential job leads, and coach candidates on how to thrive in a different environment from the one they recently left at an old job. One of their key focus areas is on resumes and CVS. Resumes and CVs are something most people probably don’t think about after landing a position at a company. Keeping a resume updated is important, but tailoring it to the position a candidate wants is even more crucial. That’s especially accurate in a world where automated parsing systems will completely reject a resume if it doesn’t meet certain criteria. To keep up with the modern, remote and tech-focused job World these days a good career coach will need to ensure you know how to tailor your resume to the position you want. Automated software has a tendency to reject otherwise qualified candidates, so you need to make sure that your resume stands out. A career coach will help you polish the resume, trim out the fluff, and ultimately help you secure a better position down the line.
