It arrives as a line in a separation agreement, usually at the moment you are least able to evaluate it. Here is what the service is, what the good version does well, and the part of the search it was never built to do.
Outplacement is bought by the company you are leaving, not by you. That single fact explains most of what follows. It exists to make an exit orderly: to reduce the risk of a dispute, to protect the employer's standing with the people still inside, and to let a board say that departing executives were looked after. Those are legitimate aims, and none of them is the same aim as getting you into your next seat quickly.
That is not a reason to refuse it. It is a reason to read the scope before you sign, because the scope is where the difference between a real service and an administrative gesture becomes visible.
Almost always. Usually competent, occasionally excellent, and rarely aimed at the specific twelve companies you actually care about.
Anything from two sessions to a year of them. The hours are the product; what fills them depends on the individual coach you are assigned.
Interview practice, profile modules, a job board, sometimes a peer group. Value varies more here than in any other component.
References, a letter, occasionally a desk. Genuinely useful in the first fortnight and largely irrelevant after it.
Nobody in an outplacement programme is accountable for whether a specific company knows your name by the end of it. The service is measured on delivery — sessions held, documents produced, satisfaction scored — because those are the things a provider can control and invoice against. The outcome you care about depends on relationships only you can hold.
Outplacement is paid to make your exit orderly. It is not paid to make your next company think of you first, and no honest provider claims otherwise.
Take the package. Use the coach. Do not mistake the programme for a search — it is a set of tools handed to you at a difficult moment, and the work of choosing companies, watching them and reaching people inside them stays yours either way.
Most comparisons of outplacement providers compare brochures. These are the questions that separate a service from a schedule, and the answers worth insisting on.
Read → Transition and outplacementThe support on offer between senior roles is mostly emotional or administrative. The two things that decide the outcome are neither, and almost nobody supplies them.
Read → The reverse job searchInstead of starting with adverts and working towards companies, you start with companies and work towards a conversation. The method, and who it suits.
Read →A short call, your target list, and an honest answer about whether this fits how you are running your search.