Executive Outplacement: The Fire-for-Hire Business
Aburdene, Patricia
Executive Outplacement: The Fire-for-Hire Business by Patricia Aburdene the public as America’s last refuge of tough, on-the-line competence. Caught up in a ruthless battle for economic...
...If that tendency is to be overcome, we need employees to be at least as concerned with matching their talent to work that needs doing as they are with what they are called, with what they are paid, and with how much security the9y...
...The consultants begin to point out recurring skills and patterns of success along which the job hunt can be modeled...
...Outplacement specialists don’t actually say the fateful words-you’re fired-to people, but they do everything else connected with the separation...
...By encouraging the fired employee to focus on his talent instead of his titles, it is taking a step toward reversing the tendency of our society to be unproductive, featherbedded, and bureaucratized...
...since most of these executives have salaries in the $40,000 range, the fees are considerable...
...The firms’ conceptual sales pitch is that if firing isn’t done at all it costs corporations money, and that if it’s done ineptly it can result in contract cancellations, staff raids, and secrets sold to competitors...
...Since then, two New York firmsTHinc...
...have...
...Assuming a six-month job search, which would be unusually long, outplacing a $40,000-a-year executive would cost a company about $25,000...
...As early as 1974, Business Week reported that 200 companies had engaged outplacement services, and the numbers have increased substantially since then...
...and Orr, Cuthrell, Fuchs-have grown ten and 20 times each...
...and as a result, the evaluation process becomes a major trauma, to be avoided whenever possible...
...Embarking on a second career after the first one loses its luster is not something most whitecollar Americans ever seriously cop sider...
...His chief concern, rather than producing or selling or otherwise doing something, tends to be maintaining the accouterments of status that he has accumulated: a vice-presidency, a big house, a secure identity...
...One outplacement firm has branch offices in Los Angeles and Houston...
...The nation’s biggest corporations have started doing business with a new breed of management consultant called executive outplacement specialists, who bill themselves as all-purpose firing experts and offer their services -as one did in a recent ad in Time magazine-for easing “the agony of executive severance...
...The average fired executive is in his forties and has been with his company since leaving college...
...Masters of the Euphemism In keeping with their status as the morticians of the business world, outplacement firms are masters of the euphemism...
...If they’re lucky they’ll also get over their initial feelings of worthlessness, form an identity separate from their old corporate one, and thus, ironically, end up more self-confident than they had been before getting fiied...
...His annual raises, like his performance and the enjoyment he gets from his job, have started to slxken...
...The answer was to create a high-priced service to perform the reverse function, and executive outplacement was born...
...Corporations don’t contract for this service merely out of altruistic concern for the people they fire, of course...
...The industry is attracting new clients all the time...
...Despite the fms’ impressive popularity, executive outplacement is a relatively recent phenomenon, with roots in the 1969-70 recession...
...Then immediately after the ceremony he takes the outplaced executive in hand...
...Underlying the sympathy, however, there is toughness: the consultant starts planting in the poor unfortunate’s mind the idea that he’d better start thinking about the future and his next job...
...This fear is communicated fully to the top management of corporations, who no doubt also feel it themselves...
...They spend the next two to five hours together talking it over, the consultant urging his new ward to “ventilate” (as they say) his true feelings about how awful the corporation is and why he shouldn’t have been fired...
...But for all the appeal of that notion, it’s not true...
...Here outplacement stops being ridiculous and starts making sense for those who go through it, if only because it forces them to size up their lives in a way that most people usually avoid...
...In its stead, the outplacement firms trot out a host of pleasanter sounding substitutes: people are dehired, or undergo executive transition, or are outplaced, relocated, phased out, or terminated...
...When the management press covers outplacement, it is usually under headlines like “Corporations Have a Heart, Finance Fired Exec’s Job Hunt...
...He’d never dream of giving it all up for something less stable that he not only hurting his company, it’s hurting him...
...There are practical economic reasons why executive outplacement firms are doing what some say is a $100-million a year business...
...Caught up in a ruthless battle for economic survival, businesses can’t afford to waste a penny...
...Corporate big-shots have found an ingenious way to avoid most of the unpleasantness, however...
...The outplacement business seems nearly ready to overtake its parent, the search business...
...firing him with a year’s severance pay would cost an additional $15,000 and cause greater pain all around...
...It’s a sign of how strongly middle-class Americans identify themselves through their job status that firing, like death, is a word not mentioned in polite conversation...
...getting the name of someone they’ve helped, let alone a corporate client, is an impossibility...
...The consultant comes in beforehand and acts out the firing with whoever has to bear the bad news...
...Because of figures like that, it’s no surprise that outplacement firms are doing so well...
...It’s only in the soft public sector, the image has it, that people can spend years in secure bureaucratic sinecures without doing anything or being evaluated...
...The consultant’s chief task is to help the candidate find a new job, which, in two to six months, it does more than Patricia Aburdene is a Washington writer...
...Executive Outplacement: The Fire-for-Hire Business by Patricia Aburdene the public as America’s last refuge of tough, on-the-line competence...
...Over the next few weeks, career plans are assessed and past mistakes identified, and soon the fired person is transformed from a broken man to a confident executive ready to sally forth to his next corporate niche...
...another has established its first international office in London...
...At THinc., fired executives are required to draw up long, detailed lists of every accomplishment in their lives and to describe in exhaustive detajl the ten or 15 most recent ones...
...In addition, the firms suggest...
...Out of jobs, with little to do but think things over, fired executives are compelled to figure out what they’re good at and what they want to do...
...Outplacement firms try to bring this process along...
...So heavily do people depend on secure jobs and so deeply do they fear rejection that they tend to avoid being evaluated, or evaluating themselves, at dl costs...
...Most outplacement firms handle a few hundred executives a year, but one large firm participates in 1,500 to 2,000 firings annually...
...There are plenty of initiative-destroying, security-laden jobs around, and they’re not just in the government and the academy...
...A Chicago firm says it contracts with “70 per cent of the major f i s in the Midwest...
...The State of New York considered, and then backed off from, a plan to hire Drake Beam for some firing help, which the firm had already provided to Bellevue Hospital...
...Outplacement firms usually get a commission of from 10 to 15 per cent of the annual salary of the executive they are firing...
...95 per cent of the time (which doesn’t say much for business’ intolerance of incompetence...
...Immediately, the consultant is on the case, a soothing, objective third party mediating between the client and what is called in the business the “candidate...
...Sometimes, of course, the clients go public on their own, to show how nice they are, and indeed the public relations of outplacement have been very good to date...
...The fired person is encouraged to see these patternswhich have been his own doing-as the story of his life, rather than seeing it as a succession of titles and corporate affiiiations...
...Just as likely, they’re in corporate management, where tenure is an unwritten but nonetheless almost ironclad agreementnot by design so much as because America’s can-do executives are creampuffs when it comes to firing...
...So when the top brass at PitneyBowes, Bristol-Myers, or Norton Company, among hundreds of others, decide to fire someone, they phone their outplacement man at Challenger, Gray and Christmas, or Drake Beam and Associates...
...Under the fiscal strain of large-scale budget cutbacks, organizations turned to their executive search firms (that consulting business was already booming by then) with a problem: how to get rid of the surplus managers the search firms sold them during the prosperous sixties...
...On a more nuts-and-bolts level, outplacing is cheaper than firing because outplacement consultants present their services as a substitute for the standard one year’s severance pay...
...In most cases, the person who’s been fired is ushered out of his boss’ office and directly into a private room where the outplacement consultant is waiting...
...So, oddly enough, there is some wheat among all the chaff of executive outplacement...
...When the moment does come that managers get fired, outplacement consultants say, it’s often just after getting a substantial raise...
...Last November, the New York Stock Exchange hired Orr, Cuthrell, Fuchs to help it reduce its staff by 125 after a reorganization...
...One New York firm, Orr, Cuthrell, Fuchs & Associates Inc., claims to have gone to work for 100 of the nation’s top 500 companies...
...that clients keep the fired executive on the company payroll for the few months it takes to find him a new job and continue his benefits as well...
...Confidentiality is like a religion for outplacers...
...anybody who’s not really performing gets ousted...
Vol. 9 • June 1977 • No. 4
