This Article: “Outplacement Firms Struggles to Do Job” published in 2009 in The Wall Street Journal is, believe me or not, still true nowadays. Nothing has changed. That is why I would like to debrief deeply about this interesting article, and tell you what makes Mankesav different…
The article starts with satisfaction, and the time needed to find a position. As a Career Coach, our first responsibility is to be clear with what we will be doing with the people your work with. For me, I never say that people will find a job in one month, two month or even one year. Because, of course, it depends first on the job market. If you want to find a job in Greece, Spain or France nowadays, good luck! You will have to compete thousands of other applicants, and even if you have the best job-search tools, remember that behind the job boards there are human-beings. And those humans won’t necessarily reckon your outstanding profile, either because their mental framework of “matching the position” is not yours, or (sometimes) basically because some of them are not very competent… So, the first thing is to accept that recruitment is not an exact science. If it were, there would not be HR services, but only computers.
The second, and main point as for me, is your own personality when it comes to looking for a job. I always compare my job of a Career-Coach to the job of a Fitness-Coach. Let’s go to it by a little story: You decide that you are too fat, or you want to gain muscles, or prepare to run a Marathon. You enroll to a gym, buy the fancy apparel, and decide to hire a Fitness-Coach to help you doing so. There comes the first session, and… You sit on a bench, unpack your Lays, Mc Donald’s and Coca-Cola, start eating them and tell your coach: “Ok, now you train, and I will lose the fat!”
Do you find it funny but stupid? Me too. Though, in my job, I have crossed hundreds of people asking me: “will you find me a job?”, to which I always answer now by this story. What I mean is that, I agree: a good fitness coach doesn’t just give you a paper to tell you what you have to do, then get your money, then leaves. A good fitness coach is there to co-program your training, depending on your agenda, constraints, following the waves of your motivation, helps to work your *** out, get the best of you. But you do the efforts, mainly. So, will I find you a job? No. WE will find you a job. And we will do even better: we will find you a career that will make your life better. The thing is that if you don’t do anything of what I suggest to do, explaining you why and how, then, we will fail. If you don’t train at the gym properly, and if you go to a junk-food provider just after every of your gym sessions and eat twice the amount of calories you just spent, you will never lose your fat, get muscles, or get back to fit. So, remember, your attitude is important, and you have to fit it with your local employment market.
Third and last thing for today: know yourself. The first thing I work with the persons I coach is their awareness of their own personality, based on the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, which enables to question their clarity regarding to their preferences and how to apply them at work. This is fundamental: we are all impacted by what is commonly considered as a good job or a good career. But you can have spent your last 20 years in a job which was not meant for you. That is a factor leading to burn-outs, bore-outs, and lose your path. Many people need to do some re-calibration and get back on tracks to what they do the best with a better well-being. I deeply believe that many of us just unconsciously screw up some application, because we know instinctively that this is not for us. Once we have spent a little of time, usually one week, to discuss and adjust this very specific point, then we can start working on “finding a job”. And lots of canned outplacement programs fail, because this fundamental is not treated properly.