Career transition services — or outplacement — can help one overcome the trauma of retrenchment, says the founder and CEO of Grow Talent Company

Sushmita Bose

You are working in a blue-chip company, and holding on to what you think is a dream job. One morning, your boss calls you into his chamber and tells you that your “services are no longer required”. Of course, there’s a compensation package that’s thrown in — say, a cheque worth three months’ salary. How do you feel? Humiliated? Cheated? Furious? Maybe all three?

Now, just hop over to the other side of the fence. You run a company that boasts of “fair” practices. Suddenly, you decide to rightsize and you have to hand out “pink slips” to the employees concerned. How do you feel? Guilty? Helpless? Angry? Maybe all three?

Would it help if someone came up just then and offered you constructive counselling and an orientation programme to get back on track?

“Definitely,” says Anil Sachdev, founder and CEO, Grow Talent Company Limited, India’s first talent management company which has also recently launched career transition services — or “outplacement” services, if you please — in the country. “Chiefly because the outplacement programme helps one come to terms with what he or she would want to do next.”

Outplacement, as a service, started in the US in the eighties, when the entire industry was undergoing a churn. Japanese products had started flooding the market, and competition was at an all-time high. In an effort to keep down costs, many companies had started downsizing and rightsizing. Today, the sector, worldwide, is estimated to be around $ 3 billion, and growing exponentially.

The most important thing that employers should keep in mind is that they have to be sensitive on D-Day: the entire exercise shouldn’t seem as though the employees are getting marching orders. As part of the programme, there are mock sessions held to get employers familiarised with reality.

“There have been many instances of former employees joining back the company once it regains its financial health,” says Sachdev. “The process shouldn’t be messy and there should be no bad blood — and employers have to realise that.”

Towards this end, workshops are conducted which are attended by all the senior managers so that they get a feel of the whole process and can empathise with the employees. “Ultimately, they have to take responsibility, they have to come across as being transparent and upfront and they must tell the employees exactly what has gone wrong where.”

A career transition services company, feels Sachdev, acts as the “shock absorber”. After the retrenchment process is done with, the employees have to be counselled — on a one-to-one basis. “At times, they clam up and need to be cajoled into speaking their minds,” he explains.

“In fact, there have been instances when some of them have broken down. We have to reconstruct their self-esteem, and convince them that there are a lot of options available: they have to get their act together and seek them out.”

Then, Grow Talent helps them get their CVs in working order so that they can get cracking at the job market. “We run several psychographic tests and, in quite a few cases, it has been revealed that the concerned person would rather be doing something else — not what he/she has been doing till then.”

For the time being, however, there are no commitments to finding them suitable jobs.

On an average, most companies allot around 8 to 15 per cent of the compensation package for hiring career transition services. “In India, the trend is pretty much the same, and no, we aren’t offering services to individuals: we are only dealing with companies,” says Sachdev.

Grow Talent has forayed into this sector in India with a strategic tie-up with the US-based, $ 500-million Right Management Consultants — the world’s largest career transition and organisational consulting firm.

The big question is: will transit be only a stopover?