Why your outplacement report says nothing

Most outplacement reporting measures utilization: how many participants logged in, how many sessions they completed, how many resources they opened. Utilization is easy to measure and easy to report, which is probably why it's what most vendors report. It is also not the same thing as an outcome. A participant can complete every session on a curriculum and still not have a resume that passes an applicant tracking system, a set of references ready to speak on their behalf, or a clear sense of what companies to target.

The industry sells access — a coach, a portal, a job board — and reports on whether that access was used. Almost nobody reports on what the participant actually produced with it: a scored, structured view of where their search stands and what specifically is holding it back.

This isn't a claim about how fast anyone gets hired — we don't have outcome data to make that claim yet, and we won't make it until we do. It's a claim about what gets measured in the meantime, and whether “62% logged in this month” tells an HR buyer anything useful about whether the program is working.