In recent times, India has been going tough on employees working across sectors, especially in IT and telecom sectors, with a spate of employee lay-offs. The results of these events have been making news and popular opinion has been turned against employers who need to restructure their workplaces. As a result, employer and customer brands have been damaged.
In addition, employees have begun to seek legal remedies to what they feel are unlawful and unfair lay-off practices. The fairly new concept of outplacement services is aiming to solve just that and aiming to help both the employers and employees in dealing with this peculiar situation.
RiseSmart, a US-based outplacement services company with its Indian operations headquartered out of Pune, is trying to make traction in the Indian market with its services and feels that it is the need of the hour in India. “Though fairly new in India, outplacement has been around in the US for more than 70 years. These companies, headquartered in the US with operations in India, have been quietly offering outplacements for at least some of their employees. The recent highly emotional atmosphere and negative media attention around lay-offs have provided a spotlight for the issue of simply laying off employees without providing appropriate support. Not only can an outplacement services company support the impacted employees, it can also partner with HR departments to make sure managers are properly prepared to deliver notifications in a way that is most ethical and humane, without attracting legal attention. This is becoming more important as employees are beginning to seek legal judgment after lay-offs,” Joel Paul, Director of Operations, India, RiseSmart told THE WEEK.
RiseSmart feels that such a kind of service has potential in India as partnering with an outplacement services provider enables companies to get expert advice prior to the lay-off and help them train their managers and HR departments with best practices for giving notice to impacted employees. It also helps in providing career transition support for employees to make sure that those employees that are being laid off leave a company on a fairly good note.
The US company has been already working with a number of organisations, especially in IT and telecom in India, and is providing them outsourcing services. “Getting started with outplacement is simple for both the employer and the employee. For the employer it involves contacting an outplacement supplier, deciding how many employees will be impacted by the lay-off, and determining which career transition packages are most appropriate for each individual. The employer simply uploads a list of employees into our platform and we take care of the rest. Within 24 hours of getting the go-ahead from the employer, we contact each individual and match each person with the best career coach based on our matching criteria. After our initial contact, each employee is assigned three career transition experts, a certified career coach, a professional resume writer, and a job sourcer to deliver hand-picked jobs that most closely match the experience and desires of the job seeker,” remarked Paul.
The company claims that ever since it began offering outplacement services in India, employees who go through their programme have been able to land new jobs in an average of 90 days. The company further claims that in addition, 71 per cent of those employees who have been referred to them have landed a job within the length of their programme with them. “Typically our programmes last from 30 to 90 days, and we have designed our services to be delivered at an individual level. We have multiple levels of programmes designed for every grade of employee so that we can help the entry-level freshers or an experienced employee in helping them get employed again. We do not have a 'one-size-fits-all' model of career transition support and work with each individual to discover what re-skilling, additional training, or education would help to land the job that will be the best fit,” added Paul.