Your next key hire may already work for you.

The problem isn't only attrition. It's what leadership doesn't know.

Workforce planning usually starts with positions, capacity and upcoming vacancies. It less often starts with the skills people have developed beyond their job descriptions. A person's current role and their full capability are not the same thing.

LinkedIn's 2025 Workplace Learning Report found that just 15% of employees said their manager had helped them build a career plan in the previous six months. This is a survey finding, not an Estonian workforce estimate. But it points to a gap: performance conversations can happen without any meaningful discussion of the next role someone might grow into.

Work Institute's 2025 Retention Report attributed 18.9% of the employee departures it studied in 2024 to career-related reasons. That does not prove that one career counselling conversation prevents resignation. It shows why ignoring career aspirations can be a management risk rather than a purely personal concern.

Why the ordinary performance review often misses the point

Most organisations give the direct manager ownership of the development conversation. That makes sense because the manager knows the work. But the same manager also depends on the employee staying in their team. When someone wants to move elsewhere, a conflict of interest can arise even if nobody behaves badly.

Employees may also worry that mentioning another role will be read as disloyalty. So both parties discuss tasks, training and targets. They avoid the harder question: where could this person use their skills best?

Career counselling and coaching are not an extended training calendar.

Career counselling helps people examine their strengths, interests, decisions and possible career directions. A coaching conversation helps someone reflect, frame choices and take responsibility for next steps. Neither means the adviser makes promotion decisions or tells an employee what job to choose.

For employers, value appears when the conversation connects to real opportunities: cross-functional projects, job shadowing, adjusted responsibilities, temporary assignments, mentoring and accessible information about internal roles. If those opportunities do not exist, they should not be promised.

Coaching shouldn't be marketed as a cure-all either. A 2023 meta-analysis of controlled executive coaching studies found positive effects on several developmental and behavioural outcomes. It did not establish that every programme pays for itself or repairs a poorly designed workplace.

Four questions to ask before approving another external hire

1. 1

   Which capabilities do we need, beyond a job title?

   Name the critical responsibilities and decisions for the next 12 months. Then look for people who already demonstrate those capabilities, even in different roles.

2. 2

   Whose career ambitions do we actually know?

   Separate the performance review from the career conversation. Make neutral career guidance available where employees cannot speak freely to their direct manager.

3. 3

   What happens to a manager who helps someone move?

   If managers lose capacity and bear all the replacement costs when they support internal moves, your system encourages talent hoarding. Make transition ownership explicit.

4. 4

   Can we offer a small opportunity before a large decision?

   Job shadowing, project work or a stretch assignment gives both sides information before making a permanent move.

How to tell whether this creates business value

Don't start with the number of coaching sessions delivered. That measures activity, not impact. Look at internal fill rates for critical roles, time a vacancy remains open, skills used across functions, and recurring career-related themes in exit conversations.

Also check whether opportunity is distributed fairly. If only the most visible people get coaching and internal opportunities, you haven't built a development system. You've created a different way to favour familiar faces.

An uncomfortable truth: good career guidance can help someone leave.

A conversation may reveal that the right role simply doesn't exist inside the company. Honest guidance can then help a person decide to move elsewhere sooner. That's why the objective cannot be retention at any cost. It is better decisions, more trust and more deliberate use of capability.

This is still better than paying indefinitely for poor role fit, unspoken frustration or slow decisions. But career counselling must never be used to conceal problems with work design, management behaviour or unfair pay. Those remain the organisation's responsibility.

What I would examine before recommending any programme

I would start with three conversations, not a training package. Which capabilities do managers struggle to find? What do people say about their next step when they have a safe place to reflect? What blocks movement across teams? Only then can we judge whether a company needs individual guidance, better manager conversations or different internal mobility rules.

For me, career guidance builds on the same principle as more than twenty years of HR work: people and businesses deserve decisions based on understanding rather than assumptions. A four-month career counselling development programme with Fontes Talent Advisory gave me practical methods for helping people think through strengths and next steps.