What good outplacement engagement actually looks like, beyond landing rate

A grown-up view of programme health metrics — activity depth, coach cadence, landing quality and sentiment — and how HRDs can read a dashboard honestly.

Landing rate is the metric everyone quotes and almost no one interrogates. It is easy to report, easy to compare, and easy to game. It also tells you very little about whether the programme actually did its job. A more honest view of outplacement performance sits underneath the headline — in engagement depth, coach cadence, the quality of the landing, and the sentiment of the people who lived through it.

The landing rate problem

Ninety-plus per cent landing rates are almost universal in provider marketing, and almost meaningless as a comparator. The definitions drift. Some counts include contract and interim work; some include people who dropped out of the programme and self-reported a role months later; some quietly stop the clock the day the contract ends.

A landing rate also says nothing about the quality of the landing. Someone who takes a role at 60% of their previous salary, in a sector they have no interest in, three months into a nine-month programme, counts the same as someone who lands a genuinely equivalent role in their preferred direction. The board sees the same headline. The employee lives a very different reality.

If you only measure landing rate, you optimise for the landing that happens fastest and is easiest to record. That is rarely the landing that most benefits the person you were supposed to be supporting.

The four layers of a healthier metric set

1. Engagement depth

The single most predictive indicator of a good outcome is how deeply the candidate engaged with the programme in the first four weeks. Not whether they logged in — whether they did the work. Uploaded a CV, met their coach twice, completed an initial assessment, drafted a target list. Providers should be able to show you the engagement funnel, not just the top of it.

2. Coach cadence and continuity

How often is the candidate meeting a coach, is it the same coach, and are the sessions actually happening? A programme that sold a 1:1 coaching model but delivers three sessions over nine months is not the programme you bought. Cadence data — booked, held, cancelled, rescheduled — should be visible per candidate and in aggregate.

3. Landing quality

The metrics that matter here are salary parity (percentage of previous total reward), sector direction (did the person land in the direction they were coaching toward), role level, and — most importantly — tenure at six months. A landing that ends in three months is a churn, not a landing.

4. Sentiment and net promoter

How the candidate feels about the support, both during and after, is a signal that shows up in Glassdoor, LinkedIn and referral hiring long before it shows up in a customer satisfaction survey. Ask it, capture it honestly, and publish it internally even when the number is uncomfortable.

Reading the dashboard honestly

Any outplacement dashboard can be made to look good if the person reading it does not know the questions to ask. A few honest tests separate a healthy programme from a well-lit one.

What the Launchpad platform actually shows

The Launchpad platform is built around the assumption that HRDs should see the same programme reality that the coach and candidate see. Engagement is tracked at the activity level — CV work, coaching bookings, market research, applications — rather than as a single login count. Coach cadence, session outcomes and objective completion are visible in the same view. Sentiment is captured at defined points, not just at exit.

This is deliberately not a marketing metric. It is an operational one, designed so that when a candidate is drifting, the programme sees it in week three, not in month six. It also gives sponsors a defensible answer when their board asks whether the outplacement spend is actually working.

The wider ImaginativeHR service — Group, Core, Complete and Executive Transition, delivered across 50+ countries by a team of 160+ including around 100 coaches — sits behind that data. The dashboard is the visible layer; the coaching relationship is the layer that does the work.

Five questions to put to your provider

The answers to these five questions tell you more about the programme than any brochure ever will. If the provider cannot answer them, the landing rate on the front page is doing a lot of work it should not be asked to do.