Recently, I had lunch with someone who works for a well-known outplacement company. One of the things he talked about really resonated with many experiences I've had with clients. He told me that, after intensely working for periods of up to three months with their clients who been laid off, he didn't see many of them using the things they’d been taught; or, for that matter, their new skills to effectively pursue job hunting. This, if you think about it, is pretty damning.

Now, he's considering leaving the outplacement business. So he may be prejudiced. Certainly, he’s a somewhat tired of the inherent frustration of working with unemployed people and the companies laying them off. He’s been in it for a long time. So what I'm going to add here is, first, that I, personally, have had experience with being laid off and went through a three-month outplacement program with another leader in that industry (not the one this fellow worked for), and, second, this is also based on my personal observations about a number of my clients who have come to me after going through intensive and very respectable outplacement themselves.

What I have to say is this: I believe that his statement about outplacement not being effective is true, and that there are two reasons for this:

1. Most outplacement companies today have been moving in the direction of building a "virtual" staff and, therefore, they offer mainly presentation-style and interactive workshops; as a result…

2. In their pursuit of lowered costs, they prefer not to offer real, in-depth, one-on-one coaching (call it counseling, if you wish) for most of their clients because it is time-consuming and contributes to overhead. I might add that high-level executives often get this, but not the majority of those laid off, not the rank-and-file…

The problem with the “virtual” approach to outplacement, the problem with these workshops conducted by these outplacement firms, even if they are interactive, is that people tend to learn things in them, good things, yes, but they don’t really have to put them into practice on a day-to-day basis. When you combine this with a corresponding lack of monitoring, as happens with one-on-one in-depth coaching, which also actually involves quite a bit of reinforcement, then the odds are that the person being outplaced will really put to use what you've taught him or her look pretty bad.

What happens is what a friend of mine used to call "the whitewash effect." People are painted with all this really good knowledge in a workshop, but it isn't deeply absorbed. (I might add that the materials used by the outplacement companies is usually first-rate; except for networking, which I’ll discuss later.) It looks good to the employer who has laid off the employee, it looks good to the employee, but it isn't really effective in helping the employee to find a new job, especially in a terribly competitive environment. The employee consequently feels that something substantial has been done for him or her, and therefore is pacified for the time being, but the net result is not really effective.

I admit it, I'm prejudiced about this. I believe deeply in coaching. And, in support of this, it's absolutely the case that when people really learn something, it consists of (a) first having the material presented to them, and then (b) actually following up to make sure they use it (feedback), and (c) critiquing them in a supportive manner about how they've done (reinforcement) so they can do the right thing. The reason for this, quite simply, is that (b) and (c) are expensive, and as I’ve said the companies that are cutting costs by laying off people don't of course like to incur additional expenses.

The analogy would be to teach how to fly a plane in a classroom without taking you up in the air in a real plane with an experienced pilot. Another analogy would teach you all about playing tennis in a classroom when never permitting you to go out on the court with a coach accompanying you. You'd never want to learn in such an incomplete environment, would you?

What we're talking about here goes far beyond outplacement services. Most job seekers operate independent of a group or coach. Many of them never even get the benefit of the workshops that outplacement offers. My question is: Then how can they be effective? How can they function at their maximum? That's why, I've come to believe, so many people want their resumes critiqued. Through my website, I see a good many resumes submitted every day that sometimes are absolutely perfect and sometimes are terrible, and whenever I asked those who have submitted excellent résumés why they're doing it, they reply, "I just wanted to improve it."

This indicates to me that they really don't know what they're doing, that they’re terribly desperate for some standard by which to proceed. I guess for marketing purposes I could really explain that the standard for a good resume is: "I help people with perfectly good resumes which don't get them interviews."

The key words in what I've written above are "feedback" and "reinforcement". In learning theory, both are important, just as important as teaching the subject matter, and if those two elements are missing, the prospect of real learning taking place -- with corresponding changes in behavior or new effective behavior occurring -- is minimal.

For these same reasons, it seems to me, unemployed people, by and large, don't network. They flatly don't know how, despite everything that's been taught. They've had very little practice. And they haven't been supported through the process. Often, they do it just plain wrong and then, because they get into "trouble", they just stop trying. Not very effective, is it? That’s why networking is a rarity in most job searches.

I believe that’s also because what's being taught about networking in an outplacement is out-and-out wrong, calculated to fail. Most networking workshops, and most networking literature, teach the job-seeker to find as many people as possible to talk to, to see if a job exists. In some cases, the material includes finding specific companies and asking them if they have any job openings. What's wrong with this is that everybody usually wants to help the job seeker; but if they don't have a job, they feel bad and, consequently, end up and not wanting any further contact with the job seeker. This, as I phrase it, quickly "burns up" the network so there isn’t any place to go.

All of this was brought home to me yesterday when I met a very nice woman whose daughter had just graduated from college at an Open House conducted by a friend, a realtor. When I began speaking with the daughter, asking her what she was doing to look for a job, she told me it was a very difficult market out there; she also said she was networking and, when I suggested that most people don't know at a network properly, she seemed rather interested and said she hadn’t ever been taught about that at school.

However, at that point her mother stepped in and reminded the daughter that they had to go. The daughter was genuinely curious; the mother seemed afraid about someone talking about such a sensitive subject with her daughter.

I got the impression that the daughter really wanted to learn something that she didn't know, but the mother jumped in and said, "We've really been networking. It's a very difficult job market out there," repeating those words as if it were a mantra. I agreed it was a "difficult job market" and then told them that one person I was coaching had just gotten a very good job last week in this very difficult market, and that another person I was coaching had just gotten a job offer which he was now considering in this "very difficult job market", so it was possible to find jobs if you used the proper approach and materials.

I guess the bottom line was that, even though they might have been defensive, I found it difficult to believe that people weren't curious to learn more, even to the point of asking how they could do so, especially in such an important area. At the least I was waiting for the daughter to check it out, to find out if there was something she could learn. But the mother seemed to be reluctant to talk about it, even when it seemed obvious that it did mean quite a bit to both of them.

The conclusion I have come to is that there's really quite a lot of denial going on, and perhaps a good bit still of shame in not having a job, and it sometimes stands in the way of really learning how to do it effectively and getting new information about how to conduct an effective job search. A sorry state of affairs, I'm unhappy to say.

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© 2002 by Lawrence M. Light. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or part prohibited without prior permission.

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