For senior hires, where expertise, client trust, and leadership complexity are involved, the true cost, when productivity loss, management time, and team disruption are factored in, can reach multiples of annual salary. Yet most organisations never carry out that fuller calculation. They measure what is easy to measure and overlook the rest.

Outplacement services often focus on CVs and interview tips while missing the person who has to use them. Drawing on her own redundancy this year, Paula Donnan explains why clarity matters more than the package, why the people who stay are watching, and what good outplacement support looks like.

By mid-career, most professionals are not short of self-awareness. What they are short of is clarity, specifically the kind of clarity that comes from having someone look at the whole picture with them and help bring order to what can feel like an overwhelming amount of noise. That is my job, and it is one I take seriously.