Improving the candidate isn’t the same as improving their employment prospects

An acquaintance of mine who has just landed a two-days-per-week job on minimum wage after twenty-three months out of work told me last week that whilst her career coach was doing the customary online victory lap, her heart was firmly around her ankles. The minimum wage job represents an 88% collapse in annual earnings for her, whilst her career coach has used her experience as yet another example of how effective the intervention has been. All of this raises a profoundly uncomfortable question: what exactly are we measuring when we say that career coaching works?

I have never had a bad career coach. Over the past decade, I have worked with two, at a combined cost of just over £5,000. Both were excellent. Not a single thing they did landed me a screening call with a recruiter, let alone a job. Three years after participating in a programme, all seven of the people I am still in touch with are still jobless. More interesting still is the fact that their redundancies predate my own by several months, as does their joining of the programme.

If the objective is to improve someone's confidence, focus or professional presentation, I have no difficulty believing that a competent coach can deliver precisely that and often very quickly. Those are meaningful outcomes, particularly for someone whose confidence may have been demolished by prolonged unemployment. But what if the objective is… employment? Not simply any employment, either, but a position reasonably commensurate with your qualifications, professional experience and previous earnings. Shouldn't the success of an intervention intended to improve employability be examined, at least in part, against the employment outcomes it produces?

It is time to start interrogating the mis-match between the outcomes advertised by a coach, or celebrated, and the outcomes demonstrably achieved and desired by a jobseeker. A rescue job is not necessarily a rescue income. Financial commitments acquired under one set of economic circumstances do not shrink in proportion to an 88% collapse in earnings. A mortgage does not disappear when your salary and savings vanish. Rent does not adjust itself to reflect your paltry £200 per week wages.

And yet we find ourselves celebrating the transition from unemployment to employment without necessarily thinking about the distance between employment and economic recovery. The issue is that coaching operates on the individual, while hiring decisions are made elsewhere. And then… the small matter of causation.

A coach can help you improve your CV but they cannot make a hiring manager read it.

They can help you articulate your value but they cannot make an employer recognise it.

They can restore confidence, but they cannot manufacture vacancies, eliminate age, gender, racial and other discriminations and they also very much cannot compel an organisation to hire, by which I very much mean pay, someone at a level commensurate with their experience.

But when someone does eventually find employment, how do we establish that the coaching was responsible? Getting a job after receiving coaching is not necessarily the same as getting a job because of it.

The intervention may have helped enormously or it may have made no discernible difference. Without examining those possibilities, we cannot reasonably attribute the outcome to the intervention simply because one preceded the other. Yet, this distinction becomes particularly important when successful employment outcomes are used to advertise, validate or celebrate the effectiveness of coaching programmes because the prevailing narrative around unemployment continues to locate the solution overwhelmingly within the unemployed person. Become more confident, more visible, more focused, more polished, more branded, more adaptable, more resilient. Reinvent yourself, your experience, your manifesting goals. The assumption is always that sufficient improvement in the individual will eventually produce a corresponding improvement in their economic circumstances.

But what if the individual was never the obstacle? What if the obstacle is a horrendously saturated market in which 1,000 people apply for one single position which may, or may not, be fully funded at the time it is advertised? What if those 1,000 people do not know that the company has already decided that the role will go to an internal candidate? What if they do not know that the employer would prefer someone in their late twenties, not because they are better qualified, but because the company believes it can pay them considerably less? What if they do not know that the position does not exist at all, and that the company is simply advertising vacancies to cosplay growth while having no intention of hiring anyone?

And what if, throughout this process, those same 1,000 people are being told that the solution lies in becoming more confident, more resilient, more visible, more adaptable, more employable?

Whilst we are selling people strategies for winning competitions without knowing whether those competitions are genuine, fair or even taking place, we really ought to be much more precise about the distinction between making someone feel better equipped to navigate the labour market and actually improving their position within it, particularly when the person paying for the intervention is unemployed, financially vulnerable and seeking something considerably more concrete than renewed self-belief. It is time to stop placing quite so much blind faith into interventions that imply influence over outcomes nobody involved in delivering them actually controls.