We started this company because the outplacement industry wasn't doing what it was being paid to do.

John Schrup was an executive at Allianz Life, the world's largest insurer, in Minneapolis. In 2006, Ford announced it would close the Twin Cities Assembly Plant in Saint Paul's Highland Park neighborhood. The plant had been building vehicles on the bluffs above the Mississippi since 1925. It was the oldest Ford factory in continuous operation. The closure played out over several years, with the final truck rolling off the line in December 2011. By the time it was over, roughly 1,800 workers had lost their jobs. These were people with decades of highly specialized manufacturing experience, entering a regional economy that had largely moved on from the kind of work they knew how to do.

John lived nearby. He started asking what would actually happen to these people. Eighteen hundred workers, most of them mid-career, with mortgages and families and skills built around an assembly line that no longer existed. Where do they go? Who helps them translate what they know into something the rest of the labor market can use? The short answer was: nobody, really. Ford would purchase outplacement services as part of the separation package. In 2006, that meant a vendor would come in, run a few group workshops in a rented conference room, hand out binders on resume writing and interviewing, and offer a handful of one-on-one coaching sessions. Then they would leave. Most workers never got enough individual attention to make a real difference.

He left his position at Allianz, signed a contract with the plant's union, and started placing the people who were being let go. That was FirstSourceTeam's first engagement.

Over the years that followed, as the business grew and John coached thousands of professionals through career transitions, a pattern kept surfacing. Every person who came to him after working with one of the large outplacement providers felt the service had failed them. The coaching was shallow. The tools were outdated. The service felt like a checkbox the employer had purchased to feel better about a difficult decision, not something designed to actually help the person receiving it.

That theme made him dig deeper. What he found was an industry that had gotten comfortable. The major firms had stopped innovating, stopped measuring outcomes honestly, and stopped treating the participant as the person the service was supposed to help. They reported 97% satisfaction to the buyer while their participants were leaving 1-star reviews on Trustpilot.

The consequence of that complacency is not abstract. Not just wasted corporate dollars, though that too. Real human impact. Job searches are long, and they are only getting longer. The people going through them are dealing with financial pressure, identity loss, and a labor market that is being reshaped by AI in real time. The industry that exists to help them through that transition is doing almost nothing to help them upskill, adapt, or compete in the market they are actually entering.

FirstSourceTeam was built to address that failure at its foundation. Not to nibble at the edges. To provide a service good enough to force the rest of the industry to start caring again. Our hope is not just to place people. It is to prove that when you build outplacement around outcomes instead of invoices, the entire category can become something better than what it has settled for.