Laureen Knudsen helps professionals navigate AI-era career disruption. Fortune 1000 transformation executive and Top 100 Women in Tech.
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This fall, HR leaders across the country will be handed a mandate: Reduce headcount. The rationale will be familiar. AI is handling work that used to require full teams. Margins are under pressure. Leadership wants to move fast.
You'll coordinate the compliance, the process, the communication and the difficult conversations that nobody wants to have. Most of that is prescribed. Legal requirements, manager training, severance calculations, WARN Act timelines; the infrastructure of a reduction in force doesn't leave much room for discretion.
But one decision still belongs to you in a meaningful way: What support do the people leaving actually receive? Not the legal minimum, but the kind of support that genuinely prepares them for what comes next. That question often gets buried under everything else, and most vendors make it easy to stop thinking about it once the contract is signed.
I've been on both sides of this. I spent decades as a transformation executive, helping Fortune 1000 organizations restructure around new technology. I know what it feels like to be handed a list. I also know what it feels like to be on the list. Both experiences shaped what I believe about what companies owe the people they let go.
Traditional outplacement isn't working anymore, and most HR leaders already sense this. You send people to a service that helps them update their résumé, practice interview answers and search job boards. The problem is that the job market they're walking into doesn't look like the one those services were designed for. AI has changed what companies hire for, how they evaluate candidates and what "qualified" means. A polished résumé and a confident handshake don't solve a structural mismatch.
What these professionals actually need isn't job search help. They need transformation support.
There's a meaningful difference. Job search help assumes the path forward looks like the path behind. Transformation support starts somewhere different: It helps professionals understand what they actually bring to a changed market. Not just their job titles and years of experience, but also the sophisticated human capabilities underneath: the judgment built from years of complex decisions, the empathy that lets them read a room, the creativity that surfaces when the obvious solution won't work. It then helps them articulate that value in language that resonates in an AI-era market, identify the kinds of problems and roles where that value is most needed and build a credible path forward even when that path doesn't yet have a clear name. In a market where the most important opportunities aren't posted anywhere, that kind of clarity is the difference between someone who lands well and someone who spins for months.
The people you're letting go are not obsolete. Many of them have spent 20 or 30 years building capabilities they've never thought to name. The data analyst who doesn't just analyze numbers but translates them into decisions executives can act on. The operations manager who doesn't just run departments but sees the invisible friction that silently drains productivity. The HR professional who doesn't just manage processes but reads cultural patterns that predict whether change will succeed or fail. These capabilities feel like "just part of the job" to the people who have them. They are not. These are the capabilities that remain stubbornly human—and they become more valuable, not less, as automation advances.
What's happening in boardrooms right now is a version of what happened in manufacturing two decades ago. Companies automated the mechanical work and eliminated the operators, then spent years trying to recover the expertise they'd discarded. Some never did. The institutional knowledge those workers carried—the subtle adjustments, the pattern recognition, the understanding of why certain processes worked—couldn't be rebuilt from documentation or retrained into new hires quickly enough to prevent costly mistakes. The same pattern is playing out in knowledge work, just faster and on a greater scale.
HR leaders are in a position to interrupt that pattern, at least for the individuals caught in it.
The question worth asking before you finalize your outplacement contracts this year is whether the support you're offering actually prepares people for the market they're entering or the market that existed five years ago. A professional who understands their human edge, knows how to position it and has a real framework for navigating what comes next is going to land better, adapt faster and reflect better on the organization that helped them get there.
There's a practical case here, too. How a company treats people on the way out shapes who wants to come in. It shapes the story that circulates in your industry. It shapes whether the employees who stay feel secure or start quietly looking. That last point deserves more attention than it usually gets. The people who remain after a significant reduction are watching closely. They're drawing conclusions about what loyalty is worth, what the company actually values and whether they want to still be here in two years. Offboarding isn't just a formality. It's a signal to everyone in the building.
Some forward-thinking companies are already rethinking this. Instead of defaulting to traditional résumé services, they're investing in transformation programs that help departing employees understand the AI-era landscape, identify their durable skills and navigate what comes next with a real plan. These programs cost less than most people assume and deliver outcomes that look nothing like the average outplacement experience.
You're going to do hard things this fall. The people you're letting go deserve support that actually works.
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