No one wants to lose their job. But in an increasingly uncertain world, layoffs and redundancies can happen to anyone. Whether you’re running a small business that has to let employees go due to unforeseen economic circumstances or an individual impacted by layoffs, using or making an outplacement service available to former employees can help them get back on their feet and into a new career fast. Outplacement services are a way to show employees you care about what happens to them after an unfortunate layoff and can potentially safeguard your reputation as an employer and stave off potential legal issues while maintaining the morale of your staff. Giving displaced employees an option isn’t just beneficial for you and the displaced employee—it’s the right thing to do. Here’s how an outplacement service can help affected employees:
Career Coaching
Career coaching is one of the most powerful aspects of an outplacement service. In career coaching, an industry expert helps their client (in this case, an affected former employee of some organization) find a new career quickly. A good outplacement service should create a personalized career coaching experience for affected employees. The goal is transformation.
A career coach can help a former employee understand what kind of skills they may need to develop to land a new role or help them form a plan for getting into a new career. Depending on the industry, the candidate will be matched to a certified career coach who can help motivate and advise them on how to get into a new career. There’s more accessibility these days, largely thanks to the internet, so keeping up with a career advisor is easy and readily accessible. A good outplacement service should only take about 24 hours to help their clients and customize their advising to the individual. Supporting the former employee at each step of the process. Whether it’s preparing them for the interview or congratulating them for getting a new job, career coaching is an essential part of the outplacement process.
Job Matching
There was a time when finding a job required you to physically travel to another location to interview and, if hired, work. With the widespread use of mobile devices and the internet, this is simply no longer the case. Anyone can have a phone call interview or speak with a potential employer via video conference at any time. Since you can do it at home and remotely, it’s easier for the candidate as well as the potential employers. Unfortunately, some outplacement services have yet to adapt to this significant change in the way we communicate. But the ones who have tend to successfully place employees with new employers much faster and with a higher degree of success.
Using outplacement assistance for job matching and other services will have significant long-term benefits for affected employees, the morale of remaining employees at the organization, and the companies themselves. Outplacement should also come at no cost to the former employee to make their job transition as simple as possible.
Resume Services
Many resumes these days are assessed by an automated service. Some companies use automated resume screening to make their screening process go faster. On the surface, it makes sense: filter out the less qualified applicants from those who put in a resume just to see what would happen, ultimately making a recruiter’s job a bit easier. The unfortunate side effect of this is that some very high-quality resumes can be overlooked due to the processes employed by this automatic screening service. Fortunately, part of outplacement career coaching involves helping former employees rewrite, develop, and tailor their resumes to potential jobs within their field. There are other ways to get your resume through the automatic parsing of a screening system—using simple language, keywords, following instructions, and so on—but these are only supplemental to the invaluable resume tailoring a career coach can help achieve.
Better Access To Recruiters
Finding and getting in touch with recruiters is often quite challenging, even in the modern connected world. Luckily, outplacement helps here as well. Through an extensive career coaching service, outplacement prepares an employee to get better access to recruiters and hopefully land a new job. The best part about a modern outplacement service is that an employee can conduct the job search on their own time. Job listings are available on the internet and can be readily accessed from a phone. Resumes and applications are easier to submit, sometimes only requiring a resume and a name. Pre-screening, meetings, and interviews can be conducted via video conferences or through a mobile device.
There’s no need to travel to another city or state just to get an interview! Finding jobs through job boards can be rough as well, so having access to industry-specific job boards curated by a career coach makes it easier to get an interview. Preparing for one is a different story altogether, but a career coach is there to support employees throughout the process.
Fast Job Placement
The final—and perhaps most important—value of an outplacement service is how quickly they can get former employees into new jobs. Job seekers get access to numerous resources and services to help them land a new job quickly, often with a better salary than their previous position. Using a technological approach and leveraging remote capabilities, a modern outplacement company delivers a unique experience to any job seeker to get them placed in their new job as fast as possible. This value and impact makes outplacement one of the best possible solutions to unexpected layoffs and reductions in the workforce. By getting candidates into a new role quickly, outplacement eventually reduces the costs associated with layoffs and makes everything work out better for both the organization and the affected employee in the long run.
