When résumé and career coaching becomes a scam

Career coaching is often sold when a job seeker is frustrated and ready to pay for someone to explain what's wrong. That vulnerable moment is the market. It's worth understanding what the market can do with it.

Start with the incentive, because everything follows from it. A session-based coach can be paid whether or not you get hired. Their revenue comes from sessions, so the business does well when you keep coming back, and sessions that feel good can help with that. Feeling good is easy to manufacture: tell the client their résumé has hidden potential, their target role is realistic, this month's rewrite is the one. The feedback loop is weak. When you eventually land a job, it can be hard to say how much the coaching mattered, and when you don't, well, tough market. That doesn't make every coach a fraud, but it gives an honest practitioner an incentive to define the work and its end.

Then there's the tier that isn't even coaching. People selling "ATS secrets" often describe one universal machine with one score to hack. Applicant-tracking products and employer configurations vary; there is no secret score that applies everywhere (I wrote about that elsewhere on this blog). Guarantees like "interviews in 30 days or your money back" deserve a close read of the refund terms. A coaching certification may show that someone completed a course, but it does not by itself show results for clients.

I want to be fair about the failure mode, though, because I don't assume a bad coach wakes up choosing to lie. Flattery is just the path of least resistance for anyone whose job is talking to job seekers, and I say that as someone who fights it in software, where I can measure it. jobhunt's profile interview is run by a model, and we've written before about catching it grading a user's work against her own ambitions. We fixed the blatant version with a rule and a test. Then we tried adding a banned-phrase list on top, and the model paraphrased its way around the list within one test round. Even now, a mild flattering aside slips into roughly one interview in three, and it sits in our tracker as an open bug we reread transcripts for. That's an entity with no revenue motive at all, drifting toward telling people what they want to hear anyway. Add an hourly rate and the drift gets a business plan.

The mirror image matters too. Somewhere along the way I absorbed the idea that honesty means leading with the bad news, and the first version of jobhunt's fit analysis did exactly that: you'd paste a posting and get your disqualifiers up top. It read like a neg, not an analysis. Front-loading the bad news isn't extra honesty, so we reordered it: your genuine strengths argued first, the blockers named plainly after, none of them hidden. Coaches have a version of this move as well, and it's not the honest one. The practitioner who tells you your résumé is a disaster, your framing is all wrong, you'll never get callbacks like this... but they can fix it, for a package price. Flattery sells retention; devastation sells dependence. Both are the same trick: making you feel something so you don't ask for evidence.

So what does a real one look like? A few things I'd actually pay for. Mock interviews with someone from your industry who interrupts you and tells you where you lost them. That's a service with a deliverable, and it should sting a little. Genuine placement knowledge in a narrow niche: an ex-recruiter who knows which companies in your field are actually hiring and what they screen for. Concrete help with a negotiation you have in hand. Notice the shape: defined scope, checkable claims, an end date. The person should be trying to finish working with you.

And one filter that costs nothing: in the first session, count how many times they tell you something you didn't want to hear. A coach who never says no is running the same playbook as the AI tools that never say no. You're not paying for agreement. You can get that free, at scale, from any chatbot on the internet. The scarce thing is someone who'll look at your actual record and tell you the truth about it, and if you find one of those, human or otherwise, they're worth keeping.