Career coach can make the difference in job hunt

  • By Mara Lee The Hartford Courant
  • Tuesday, July 9, 2013 5:39pm
  • Business

When Marcia LaReau was laid off from the human resources job she’d held at Cigna for five years, co-workers who knew her asked: “Will you help me find a good job?”

LaReau had specialized in coaching new hires who weren’t integrating well, as she diplomatically puts it, and co-workers knew that meant she could help people figure out exactly what kinds of jobs played to their strengths.

LaReau initially thought the business she founded because of those requests would be built around helping fresh college graduates figure out what direction they should go. But as the economy tanked in 2008, she found her year-old coaching business, Forward Motion, shifting to displaced mid-career workers, and that’s still true five years later.

Generally, the people who come to her are not having near-misses, where they are getting to in-person interviews for advertised openings but the company ends up going with another candidate. Most of her clients are applying to jobs through online systems and hearing nothing back. “Everyone finds it as this black hole,” she said.

LaReau helps them expand and rewrite their resumes, and she talks to HR workers around the region to figure out the filters. She even gets permission from them to submit mock resumes to see which ones result in a call for a phone interview.

The business world has tried to turn hiring into an automated, industrial process, but it’s not very good at it, she said. “They want the perfect person. That’s not how it works.”

She develops relationships with HR officials, telling them she will help them find the right person faster, and with outside recruiters, telling them she will help them build their reputations.

But the relationships she develops with her clients are most critical. “They feel like a failure because they lost a job. They feel like a failure because they don’t have a job,” LaReau said. She said many of her clients tell her: “I never needed help to get a job before.”

So she said her first task is “putting that person back together.”

One example of her ability to do that is this concrete advice on how to fight the feelings of hopelessness that unemployment can bring.

LaReau said that, on average, a client spends three months working with her before he or she finds work. The cost is often $2,200 to $2,500, but she allows rank-and-file unemployed people to pay some of it after they get back to work. (About 35 percent of her clients are in jobs and trying to figure out a better career path, and 30 percent of the unemployed workers were high-level executives.)

While gaps in employment can knock candidates out of the running, LaReau said they are not a problem when candidates explain how they have used the time.

“Every single individual has a reason not to hire them. They have to be handled on the cover letter and the resume, or they’re not going to get a job.”

For instance, she helped a recent graduate with below a 2.0 grade point average land a career-track job. He explained his poor grades by showing how he threw himself into theater productions, and how that prepared him for the work world.

LaReau has lived the career transitions that she shepherds clients through. She was a music professor and an orchestra conductor before becoming a software quality tester, and then a trainer at major insurance companies. She hopscotched from a $23,000 job in testing, to a middle-class job to The Hartford, to a six-figure salary at Cigna.

She said the outplacement firm working with people laid off from The Hartford thought she was crazy to shoot for a six-figure salary. After eight interviews for a job at Cigna, she told them the pay she wanted. And she got it.

“I wasn’t asking top of the pay grade,” LaReau said. “Knowing market value is critical.”

After her clients get offers, she helps them negotiate salary, and 75 percent get more than the initial offer, usually 5 percent to 10 percent more, she said.

“Most have never negotiated for salary before,” LaReau said. “In this economy, they don’t want to jinx it.” But LaReau said offers are coming in low, and the HR officials know it.

Al Grimm, 58, hired LaReau in 2008 after he was laid off from of his computer teaching job at a Christian school in Simsbury, Conn. He said he was offered a job as an IT manager 10 months after he lost his job, at $42,000, about $6,000 more than he’d made as a teacher. With LaReau’s help, he negotiated, and received $47,000.

“I would’ve accepted what they offered,” he said, so he more than made up what he had paid her.

After four years with that agency, he took another IT consulting job for $52,000.

“Marcia is probably better than anybody I’ve ever seen do it in interviewing you,” he said. “She can really put you on the spot.”

LaReau said it has taken her six years to nearly reach her income goals for her business.

“I never thought it would be this hard,” she said, and she had to dip into her retirement savings as, for several years, she earned a quarter to a third of what she used to make at Cigna.

She said she often thought: “Should I be doing this?” But she said as of the past six to eight months, “I’m finally seeing I’m going to make it.”

—-

&Copy;2013 The Hartford Courant (Hartford, Conn.)

Visit The Hartford Courant (Hartford, Conn.) at www.courant.com

Distributed by MCT Information Services

——-

Talk to us

> Give us your news tips.

> Send us a letter to the editor.

> More Herald contact information.

More in Business

Black Press Media operates Sound Publishing, the largest community news organization in Washington State with dailies and community news outlets in Alaska.
Black Press Media concludes transition of ownership

Black Press Media, which operates Sound Publishing, completed its sale Monday (March 25), following the formerly announced corporate restructuring.

Maygen Hetherington, executive director of the Historic Downtown Snohomish Association, laughs during an interview in her office on Thursday, Feb. 15, 2024, in Snohomish, Washington. (Ryan Berry / The Herald)
Maygen Hetherington: tireless advocate for the city of Snohomish

Historic Downtown Snohomish Association receives the Opportunity Lives Here award from Economic Alliance.

FILE - Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs poses in front of photos of the 15 people who previously held the office on Nov. 22, 2021, after he was sworn in at the Capitol in Olympia, Wash. Hobbs faces several challengers as he runs for election to the office he was appointed to last fall. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File)
Secretary of State Steve Hobbs: ‘I wanted to serve my country’

Hobbs, a former Lake Stevens senator, is the recipient of the Henry M. Jackson Award from Economic Alliance Snohomish County.

Mark Duffy poses for a photo in his office at the Mountain Pacific Bank headquarters on Wednesday, Feb. 14, 2024 in Everett, Washington. (Annie Barker / The Herald)
Mark Duffy: Building a hometown bank; giving kids an opportunity

Mountain Pacific Bank’s founder is the recipient of the Fluke Award from Economic Alliance Snohomish County.

Barb Tolbert poses for a photo at Silver Scoop Ice Cream on Thursday, Feb. 29, 2024 in Arlington, Washington. (Annie Barker / The Herald)
Barb Tolbert: Former mayor piloted Arlington out of economic brink

Tolbert won the Elson S. Floyd Award, honoring a leader who has “created lasting opportunities” for the underserved.

Photo provided by 
Economic Alliance
Economic Alliance presented one of the Washington Rising Stem Awards to Katie Larios, a senior at Mountlake Terrace High School.
Mountlake Terrace High School senior wins state STEM award

Katie Larios was honored at an Economic Alliance gathering: “A champion for other young women of color in STEM.”

The Westwood Rainier is one of the seven ships in the Westwood line. The ships serve ports in the Pacific Northwest and Northeast Asia. (Photo provided by Swire Shipping)
Westwood Shipping Lines, an Everett mainstay, has new name

The four green-hulled Westwood vessels will keep their names, but the ships will display the Swire Shipping flag.

A Keyport ship docked at Lake Union in Seattle in June 2018. The ship spends most of the year in Alaska harvesting Golden King crab in the Bering Sea. During the summer it ties up for maintenance and repairs at Lake Union. (Keyport LLC)
In crabbers’ turbulent moment, Edmonds seafood processor ‘saved our season’

When a processing plant in Alaska closed, Edmonds-based business Keyport stepped up to solve a “no-win situation.”

Angela Harris, Executive Director of the Port of Edmonds, stands at the port’s marina on Wednesday, Jan. 24, 2024, in Edmonds, Washington. (Ryan Berry / The Herald)
Leadership, love for the Port of Edmonds got exec the job

Shoring up an aging seawall is the first order of business for Angela Harris, the first woman to lead the Edmonds port.

The Cascade Warbirds fly over Naval Station Everett. (Sue Misao / The Herald file)
Bothell High School senior awarded $2,500 to keep on flying

Cascade Warbirds scholarship helps students 16-21 continue flight training and earn a private pilot’s certificate.

Rachel Gardner, the owner of Musicology Co., a new music boutique record store on Thursday, Jan. 18, 2024 in Edmonds, Washington. Musicology Co. will open in February, selling used and new vinyl, CDs and other music-related merchandise. (Olivia Vanni / The Herald)
New Edmonds record shop intends to be a ‘destination for every musician’

Rachel Gardner opened Musicology Co. this month, filling a record store gap in Edmonds.

MyMyToyStore.com owner Tom Harrison at his brick and mortar storefront on Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2022 in Everett, Washington. (Olivia Vanni / The Herald)
Burst pipe permanently closes downtown Everett toy store

After a pipe flooded the store, MyMyToystore in downtown Everett closed. Owner Tom Harrison is already on to his next venture.

Support local journalism

If you value local news, make a gift now to support the trusted journalism you get in The Daily Herald. Donations processed in this system are not tax deductible.