Career Articles

What to do if You Get Laid Off

By Bill Caswell 

Job lay-offs never occur nicely or with sufficient warning, even if the signals were there for all to see in the months leading up to the black day.  So how should you respond to this difficult situation, to pick up the pieces and get on with your working career and your personal life?

Recognizing the Trauma

Any great negative change goes through six known evolutionary stages: shock, denial, anger, depression, acceptance and recovery.  No one, but Superman, can jump lightly from stage 1 to stage 6.  But if you think back to your own past difficulties you may recognize many of these stages.  The one thing you will realize at this point is that somehow you survived that past trauma (and perhaps, you may even have prospered from it) although at the time you would never have thought that possible.  This lay-off will be no different than past traumas; eventually you will survive and move on with your world and your life.

Dealing with the Trauma

In the meantime you must deal with the inevitable upset.  The first step is to take action so that you have some sense of control over your life.  The negative consequences of the shock and denial stages can be lessened somewhat because by taking action you will be dealing directly with that loss of control that suddenly-being-without-a-job engenders.  This new control mitigates that helpless, ‘I’m-no-longer-in-charge’ feeling.  Even the anger may subside somewhat, especially if you see the opportunity opening before you as stronger than that situation that closed behind you.  If that is the case, depression will fall by the wayside and acceptance and recovery will be well on the way.

 The Ideal Action

Of course, from our perspective the ideal solution is for you to quickly sign up for career coaching because having an objective, experienced counselor in your corner will provide not only the support you need and the knowledge about job-searching but also the chance to earn more money than you would on your own.  A good coach takes emotion – your emotions – out of the equation and can lead you to that new job two or three times faster than you would on your own.

The Need for a Compromise

“But I don’t have a month’s or even a half month’s wages to spend for someone else to help me find a job; I have to feed my family, ” might be your refrain.  The CCI Mission is to help people find meaningful jobs.  So if we can pass on some advice on how to do it yourself, we are pleased to do that, and do so with this newsletter. 

First, let’s put it all in perspective.  We think that if you hire a career coaching company your prospects for finding a job in the next few months will jump from 1% to over 90%.  We also think that if you are able to successfully use the advice on this page, your chances will shift from 1% to over 10%.  A ten times increase in chance is probably worth your reading a newsletter. 

Comparing the Two

In the following section we will tell you 8 of the 17 things that we would do and then suggest what you might do on your own, without us to get closer to this professional approach.

 

Item: Profile 

CCI Does: Give a minimum of three tests to understand what drives you as a person.

You Might: Pick the two strongest of the following 4 characteristics:

P : Driven, active

A: Detailed, thorough

V: Ideas, creative

F: Like people a lot

 

Item: Feats

CCI Does: Get you to define 16 achievements over your life.

You Might: Make a list of a dozen of your feats and show how the two characteristics chosen (P, V, for example) above shine through in each case. List your best five feats on a single page.

 

Item: Objective

CCI Does: Discover what you really want to do and what you can do well.

You Might: Start with a fresh piece of paper; write down what you love to do and what you hate to do. Design your new job with that in mind

Item: Resume

CCI Does: Create a resume that has the reader understand and believe who you really are.

You Might: Ensure page 1, will have the two boxes above; that page 2 will have all the traditional job experience, education, etc.

 

Item: Gate-keepers 

CCI Does:  Show you how to get around those who want to pigeon-hole you.

You Might: Avoid recruiters. Avoid HR departments. (because you are one of many and we are trying to improve your odds, not decrease them)

 

Item: Network I

CCI Does: Show you how to build a meaningful network even when you don’t have one.

You Might: Avoid well-meaning friends and advisors.

 

Item: Network II

CCI Does: Illustrate how to work the network so that they really want to see you.

You Might: Keep the meeting short. Listen 70%; talk 30%. Not ask for a job; let them suggest a job

 

Item: Interview

CCI Does: Have you go through 94 traps along the way.

You Might: List what embarrasses you (such as having been fired) and figure out a positive, honest response for each (The job and I did not fit but firing opened the door to the next job, which was terrific)

 

Item: Negotiate salary

CCI Does: Explain 11 different things you can do to get yourself an extra $5k to $20k without jeopardizing that new position.

You Might: Defer all salary negotiations until the job has actually been offered to you.

Make them state the first figure (Remember, the person who states the first number loses)

Conclusions

1.    Getting a new job is a lot of work – even for people who know what they are doing such as career coaching firms.  Therefore be ready to make your job search a full-time job.

2.    Avoid the lottery – of sending your resume to a job just because it happens to fit you.  It happens to fit dozens of others too.  Those are terrible odds to play.  Networking odds are at least 100 times better for you.

3.    Understand that you will get a job because you are networking at the right place at the right time even though it may seem purely coincidental.  Chaos theory and its associated mathematics shows why your arrival as the sole applicant to this position is not the coincidence your intuition suggests it ought to be.

4.     Getting professional job-hunting help is a no-brainer if you look at it from a return on investment perspective – i.e. constant coaching when your mood is down or you are about to give up, a faster job-find, more money at the job, a job that actually fits your personal drivers, etc.  Any one of these more than covers your fee.  Perhaps, that is why our own staff members say they would never begin a job search themselves without a coach in their corner – even though they KNOW exactly what to do.

Irrespective of how you approach the job search, we wish you very good hunting.

Bill Caswell is principal consultant at Career Coaching International. You can connect with Bill at www.ccinternational.ca.