Workers now stay shorter in a job

People used to last 15 years in a single job. Now, they stay 30 months, on average.

That is because today, no one is assured of his job tenure. Everything associated with job security is gone. Employees work anywhere, anytime, anyhow.

The question is not even about employment anymore but “employability”, Lee Hecht Harrison (LHH) Managing Director Vicente Kilayko told Manila Bulletin.

LHH calls itself a global talent mobility leader specializing in Career Transition Service (CTS), also known as Outplacement. Companies who lay off employees hire LHH to help their ex-workforce find other jobs.

Hence, CTS covers everything from counseling workers as soon as they are notified they are terminated to helping them break the news to their families, from helping them how to plan their lives – their priorities at that point in time versus their skills, to teaching them to manage their finances, writing resumes or training for new skills or entrepreneurship.

LHH’s job search support client office in Makati features a conference room well-stocked with boxes of tissues (should meetings get emotional), work stations to aid job-hunting workers, secretarial services and a library.

“We help laid off people find new jobs 50 percent faster. But we are not head hunters. We don’t recruit people. Companies don’t hire us to find people to fill up positions,” Kilayko clarified.

“The ones who pay us are the companies who are making changes and letting go of their workers. We create a bridge between two careers.”

LHH also sees to it that client companies let go of people properly, with no false promises, minimizing court suits, helping maintain the morale of the staff who remain.

Significantly, most of their contracts are global, from multinational companies operating in the Philippines. They have serviced over 5,000 workers laid off by a semiconductor chip-maker in an outplacement program which lasted for three years.

“When we started here 14 years ago, we only had multinational clients. We have no competition. Our first Filipino company was a local newspaper,” he recalled.

So far, LHH has catered to more than 100 local and foreign companies and served expats, CEOs, country managers, senior and junior execs, supervisors, field staff, shop floor employees in transition.

Their clientele covered the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) sector, Banks and Financial Institutions, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and Shared Services, Telecom, Pharmaceuticals, Oil and Gas, Logistics and Semiconductors.

Still, Outplacement is still an alien term in the Philippines, with just 2-3 per cent of laid-off or displaced workers using it. “It’s a matter of awareness,” the LHH Managing Director acknowledged.