At least in Europe it is not uncommon. For example when the small animation studio I used to work for many years ago had to lay off 80% of its employees due to lack of work, the managers there called around to friends they had in the industry and helped set up at least informal meetings.

Yes, and often times they'll help match you with recruiters and even keep you on the payroll for a week or two while you shop your resume around. Obviously not all or even most companies do this, but I've seen it in the US.

I can't say anything about "normal", but my own personal anecdata are that laid off employees are normally offered some kind of assistance. Only a couple times in 30 years has it been me personally, and in both cases I was offered help (that actually resulted in me getting another job within that organization, actually). In many other cases, some kind of networking assistance is given. When AMD was closing fabs in the SV area in the early 90's, they gave blue-collar employees 6 months of retraining, since they were unlikely to find other fab jobs in that area. So it does happen, even in the U.S.

It happens. I'd never experienced it before signing on with the company I work for now. But I've survived several rounds of layoffs over the years and employees who asked would often be shown some help in the form of at least seeing if there was another place in the company for them.

I'm not sure about normal, though.

It's not uncommon. A lot of the layoff "process" often includes resources to help with finding a new job. As with anything, it depends the company, but it isn't anomalous for a company to provide re-jobbing support as part of the severance.

I wouldn't expect it. I've been laid off by a start-up before and they didn't offer this help to any of us, but did give us a month of severance as opposed to the necessary 2 weeks (did have to be there for two years for this though)

Companies I have worked for (US) have always offered a 3rd-party service to assist those affected by layoffs find new employment. I have never heard of anyone actually using these services though.