Outplacement & Career Transition Services

Career Horizons provides expert outplacement and career transition services to organizations throughout Seattle, Washington State, and beyond. We help employers support departing employees through layoffs, reductions in force, restructuring, and other workforce transitions — providing highly personalized career coaching and job search assistance designed for today’s rapidly changing hiring market.

Since 2004, Career Horizons has supported employers throughout Seattle, Bellevue, Washington State, and beyond who provide outplacement assistance to departing executives, managers, individual contributors, and employee groups. Our key point of pride? Our services are highly personalized, hands-on, and built around today’s job market — combining expert career coaching with advanced job search strategies, AI tools, resume development, LinkedIn optimization, networking, interviewing, and targeted employer research.

If you’re an HR executive, business owner, or organizational leader seeking outplacement support for one employee or an entire group, we’d be happy to discuss your needs and recommend an appropriate level of support. If you’re an individual who has been offered outplacement assistance by your employer, we can also help you understand your options and get started. Please contact us here to learn more about our services!

Why Employers Choose Career Horizons

30+ Years of Career Coaching & Job Search Expertise
Outplacement recipients work directly with Career Horizons founder Matt Youngquist, drawing on more than three decades of career coaching and job search expertise. They aren’t handed off to subcontractors, vendors, or junior coaches with limited experience.

Hands-On Resume & LinkedIn Support
We’ve personally written more than 10,000 resumes and have helped clients build effective LinkedIn profiles since the platform’s earliest days. Rather than simply reviewing these materials or offering suggestions, we can directly edit, rewrite, or develop them from scratch when needed.

Advanced AI Tools & Job Search Resources
Career Horizons has fully embraced AI and its rapidly growing role in job searching and recruiting. Outplacement recipients receive access to specialized AI-powered tools we’ve developed for resume analysis, customization, cover letters, and other job search needs—along with practical guidance on where AI provides genuine value and where its capabilities tend to be overhyped.

Flexible Outplacement Pricing Options
To accommodate organizations of different sizes, needs, and budgets, Career Horizons offers flexible outplacement pricing options. These include retained monthly programs for senior executives, long-tenured employees, and other key contributors, as well as affordable hourly options for situations where a more targeted level of support—or greater budget flexibility—is appropriate.

Practical, Action-Oriented Career Coaching
Our approach emphasizes practical steps that help departing employees move forward—identifying opportunities, improving their job search strategy, strengthening resumes and LinkedIn profiles, building connections, preparing for interviews, and taking concrete steps toward their next position.

Outplacement is essentially corporate-sponsored career transition support.  Unlike privately-paid coaching assistance, it is a severance benefit provided by companies to assist departing employees in getting their job hunting efforts off to a smooth and successful start following a corporate restructuring, layoff, or termination event.  Typically, upon notification of a layoff or termination, an employee will be informed that they are eligible to receive this kind of support and will have access to a certain number of hours, or months, of assistance to help get their job hunting efforts off to a smooth, successful start.

While there are many different approaches to providing outplacement — with some firms emphasizing low-cost group workshops and online learning modules — at Career Horizons, we’ve always insisted on providing these services via a customized, high-touch 1:1 approach.  Essentially, once an eligible individual contacts us, we’ll set up a meeting to explain the services in detail, discuss the individual’s situation/goals, and immediately begin mapping out the game plan we feel will most likely help the person find new employment quickly if that’s their primary goal.  From there, we’ll schedule a series of follow-up meetings, calls, and/or deliverables (depending on the individual’s program parameters) to get the process underway and assist the client in successfully working through all of the moving parts needed to get a successful job search campaign underway.

At Career Horizons, we keep the options pretty simple and straightforward.  In most cases, employers can choose to provide just a set number of coaching hours (frequently 3-7) for each eligible employee that can be used to get help with any aspect of the job hunting process they feel would be most useful.  Alternatively, for executive-level employees and longer-tenured staff, a full monthly “retained” outplacement program might be appropriate where we would provide unlimited help with all aspects of the job hunting process during the contracted period of time.  For a complete breakdown of these program options, please contact us here and we can send you a brochure outlining the various tiers of services and associated pricing.

While admittedly, we might be a bit biased, we feel that our outplacement philosophy is significantly different than the models offered by many other firms — and many of the clients we work with, in fact, praise our approach as being far more beneficial than what they’ve experienced working with other “traditional” outplacement providers whose services they’ve found to be generic, impersonal, and underwhelming.

For starters, all of our coaching is delivered by individuals with 20+ years in the career coaching, resume-writing, and job search support field – not adjunct consultants or contractors with only a few weeks/months of training under their belt.  Secondly, the services are all conducted on a 1:1 basis and tailored to the specific needs of each client; there’s no formulaic approach or A-Z model that has to be followed if a client doesn’t need help in certain areas or is already highly familiar with certain aspects of the job hunting process.  And lastly, given our action bias and emphasis on career-related technology usage, we’re able to serve as a force multiplier to professionals/executives who might already know quite a bit about the job hunting process.  No matter how much experience a client might have with resume writing, LinkedIn usage, or the recent wave of AI tools, we are able to show them new techniques and approaches they simply have never encountered before.

Again, our goal isn’t just to revisit all of the standard job search and resume advice available on the web at large.  It’s to show people innovative new ways that they can use to promote themselves, track down relevant leads, gain a competitive edge, and accelerate the process of finding their next great opportunity.

Generally, once a person has been impacted by a layoff or separation event at a company, they will be informed (typically by the HR department) if the company will be providing them with any paid outplacement assistance — and normally the departing employee will receive written documentation in their severance packet about the services and how to get them started.  In some cases, however, an employee who will be leaving a company (either voluntarily or involuntarily) can ask their company if they’d be willing to provide such assistance and the organization might agree to do so.  Many companies are simply unaware of the outplacement support option and may not realize that this type of assistance can be very valuable when it comes to personnel changes.  So it never hurts to ask and inquire as to whether your employer might be willing to sponsor this type of support, should you find yourself facing a layoff or termination situation!

Essentially, in going through an outplacement program with Career Horizons, we’d be able to provide you with assistance and expert advice on virtually any facet of the job hunting or career management process.  The most common areas that people request help with include resume development, LinkedIn profile improvement, new career exploration assistance, interviewing, negotiation, and advice around all aspects of job lead generation (e.g. networking effectively, working with recruiters, identifying new potential target companies, uncovering published job leads, etc.) and how to go about the process in the most efficient, effective manner.

If helpful, here are some of the questions that very commonly come up in our outplacement sessions and that we can provide candidates with very specific advice around:

• What is the current state of the job market and where do most of the opportunities lie?
• Should I hunt for the same kind of job I just left or is it time to consider a career change?
• What resume & cover letter formats are employers responding to most positively these days?
• What are the keys to optimizing my LinkedIn profile and using that site most effectively?
• What other websites and tools are the most useful for professionals in transition?
• How is AI changing the job market and what tools should I be using to improve my odds, if any?
• Are staffing agencies and recruiters a useful job source, and if so, how do I find and contact them?
• What are the keys to networking and uncovering leads/referrals through personal contacts?
• How do I find the companies that fit me best and are most in need of my skills?
• How can I improve my interviewing skills to gain a competitive edge for top positions?
• What negotiating techniques can help me ensure that I get paid what I’m worth?

Absolutely.  Whenever a professional goes through one of our outplacement programs, they’ll have the peace of mind of knowing that all of their discussions with us are 100% confidential — not only due to the emotional turbulence that often accompanies job changes, but also because we want them to have the utmost confidence that we are fully present and working directly, on their behalf, to help them reach their goals.  Once an outplacement program commences, the only information shared with an individual’s former employer is confirmation that yes, the individual has contacted us and is taking advantage of the benefit in question.

The short answer is yes — in addition to the core of the service, which is built around customized 1:1 coaching, all outplacement recipients will also have ongoing access to the wealth of resources in our “Client Resources” website area.  This password-protected section of our site contains a full 25-chapter job hunting workbook, multiple AI-enhanced job hunting tools, extensive examples of effective resumes and cover letters, detailed interviewing advice, and numerous other handouts and materials to help job hunters achieve success.  Clients of the firm will also receive our monthly newsletter and be eligible to join our Career Horizons LinkedIn Group, encompassing a large network of former clients who are willing to share their experience and assist others currently going through the transition process.