He’s well-dressed. He’s well-traveled. He’s well-versed: His “you’re fired” finesse goes down like 20-year-old scotch and makes Donald Trump look like an amateur.
And he’s, well, totally fiction.
Hollywood hunk George Clooney’s turn in “Up in the Air” as a jet-setting hired gun who spends his career ending others’ while racking up millions of frequent flyer miles is the zeitgeist of this recession. Clooney’s Ryan Bingham is the perfect anti-hero at a time when 15 million people are out of work —and more than half of them received their walking papers in the last two years.
But the movie’s “Terminator”-style of terminating workers is nowhere near real life.
“There’s no such person,” said John Challenger, head of the country’s oldest outplacement firm, Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The company created the concept of outplacement services and has spent the last five decades helping workers find their way through their just-fired fogs and into new jobs.
In more recent times, Challenger has built a national reputation issuing reports on the state of the economy, jobs, layoffs, workers and executives. But its bread-and-butter work continues to be outplacement and career transition services.
So the movie’s skewed depiction of what happens to people once they’re fired has those in the outplacement and career transition field justifiably wanting to set the record straight.
‘Worst I’ve ever seen’
“It’s a poignant movie,” Challenger said. But he admits he “feels a little upset” when people equate Clooney’s on-screen behavior and those of the fictional company he works for with what happens in the real world.
Outplacement and career transition firms began seeing a substantial increase in demand for their services long before the movie opened last year.
“This has been a more difficult recession,” said Challenger, who has been in the field himself 25 years and has guided workers through three previous recessions. His company, which has 27 U.S. offices, including one in Atlanta, has been called in to help hundreds of companies around the globe who have cut their workforces.
This downturn “may be the worst I’ve ever seen,” he said. “A lot more people who normally would have had jobs have struggled to find them. It has been such a long recession.”
And a ripe topic for Hollywood to explore. But Clooney’s hit-it-and-quit-it approach is mostly Hollywood high drama, and leaves out the painful duties outplacement counselors perform in the wake of firings and layoffs.
A continuous process
Many outplacement counselors help those let go pack up their personal belongings and clean out their cubicles and offices. They escort them out of the building and to their cars. They help workers figure out how best to tell their families what has happened. They push and prod for months, helping ego-injured workers find new skills or brush up on old ones.
All the while, the aim is getting the suddenly jobless to look and move forward.
“In the movie, he lets them go and never talks to them again,” Challenger said. “What we do is try to catch the person. [The companies] hire us to cushion the shock and help [workers] deal with the loss,” he said.
After workers learn they’ve been let go, they usually get packages detailing their severance and benefits. They’re then offered outplacement services, which are paid for by the company and often include help with re-crafting career goals, resume-writing and training in job search and interview skills.
In years past, Challenger said, many of the people his company has worked with managed to find jobs during the time they were eligible for outplacement service. Now, he says, it’s not unusual for a person to go through a year of outplacement service and still not find new work because of the unusually tight job market.
Lifestyle captured
As for the movie’s other major thread, Clooney’s obsessive quest to hit the 10 million-mile mark in frequent flyer points? It’s a lofty reality that Atlanta attorney David Hagaman can relate to. Hagaman, a partner in the law firm of Ford & Harrison, is a lifetime gold member of Delta’s Frequent Flyer Miles program, having flown more than 2.5 million miles for the employment law firm.
In its depiction of Clooney’s character’s lifestyle, Hagaman said, “The movie was very realistic. The flying. Being in hotels. The life on the road. I’ve talked to scores of people over the years who travel, including some of my [law] partners. That’s a lonely kind of life.”
Mary Lynn Miller, chief operating officer of the Society for Human Resource Management’s Atlanta chapter, went to see the movie with a group of chapter members because, she said, it has “a lot of HR implications.”
The film showed the brutal effects of a bad economy and the tough job many human resource professionals face right now.
“It’s tough on everybody,” she said.
Still, as any “Up in the Air” fan can tell you, if you have to come face to face with a hired gun, you could do worse than George Clooney.
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