Job Transition, Outplacement Services etc

Received an email today from ere.net on www.transitionconcierge.com/contact.php. Makes a lot of sense.

Bigger corporations often spend money on outplacement services for laid off employees. I've always viewed these with skepticism; it often seems more like a means of counteracting the negative PR for the company than a valuable service for the displaced employee. Help you re-write your resume, or as the article says, go to group therapy or grief counseling sessions? As the article notes, the best way to avoid grief and frustration is to find something great, fast. And transitionconcierge evidently focuses on funneling job leads to the employees to act on. A more practical approach perhaps.

The main thing is for the laid off employee to get busy, and land something, even if interim, fairly quickly, before frustration sets in, and before the process leads to self-doubt and depression.

Many of the outplacement firms are simply organizations, including recruiting firms, looking for somewhere to cash in on the recession, since recruiting or other revenues have taken a hit. How much value they actually deliver to the employees is debatable. To answer that, we'd need to know how many people they really helped find jobs. In reality? probably very few.