By James R. Hagerty Sept. 20, 2019 10:30 am ET James Challenger had tried law, advertising and manufacturing of gas heaters before dreaming up in the mid-1960s what he called a wild idea: persuading companies to pay him to help find new jobs for executives and middle managers they were laying off.
His goal was to have his counselors on the spot to meet people immediately after they learned of their dismissals. The idea was to prevent them from doing something stupid, like bad-mouthing themselves or their former employers. “There’s a great tendency to destroy your market in that first week,” he told Nation’s Business in 1992.
His approach came partly from his own experience. When business was slow in the early days, Mr. Challenger interviewed for jobs that he didn’t plan to accept, merely “to see what worked and what didn’t work.” He said he was offered a job about half the time. He and Ruth “Timmey” Gordon Rozier both worked on the 1952 presidential campaign of Adlai Stevenson. They married in June of that year.
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