Job Consultation Form Template
The first session of any coaching engagement follows a script everyone can predict: twenty minutes of biography — where they’ve worked, what they’ve done, why they’re here — ten minutes of goal statements that will be revised twice, and ten minutes of actual thinking, which is the part the client paid for. The session isn’t badly run. It’s badly sequenced, because everything in the first thirty minutes could have arrived in writing the night before.
This job consultation form template moves the biography to pre-work. The client completes it before session one, on their own time and in their own words, and the coach opens the first meeting already fluent in the story. What was a warm-up becomes a working session from minute one — which is also, not incidentally, the fastest way to prove the engagement’s value to someone deciding whether to continue.
The Story, In Their Words
One substantial long text prompt anchors the intake: walk me through your working life so far — the moves that made sense, the ones that didn’t, and where you are now. The phrasing matters. It invites narrative rather than a recitation of titles, and narratives contain the material coaching actually works with: the pivot they regret, the role they drifted into, the year they describe in one sentence that clearly deserves several. Coaches consistently report that this single answer tells them more than a resume ever will.
Targets, and Their Reality Check
Goal statements at intake are reliably vague — something more senior, a better culture — so the form pairs the aspiration with pressure:
- The target roles, chosen from a multiple choice of the functions and levels they’re aiming at, plus a line naming two or three specific jobs or companies that represent the target.
- The honest constraint. What’s non-negotiable — location, salary floor, remote status, notice period — captured now, because constraints discovered in week six invalidate plans built in week one.
- The timeline. Are we designing a six-month move or a two-year repositioning? An opinion scale on urgency sets the engagement’s whole tempo.
The Skills Audit, Self-Reported
A rating block has the client score themselves across the competencies their target roles demand — technical depth, communication, leadership, industry knowledge, whatever the coaching niche requires. Two things happen with this data. In session one, the scores that don’t match the coach’s read of the story become the first probing conversation — the gap between self-assessment and evidence is often the core coaching material. Across a full engagement, re-running the same audit later makes progress visible to the client in their own handwriting, which is worth more than any coach’s testimonial.
The Resume and the Public Footprint
A file upload collects the current resume — the document the engagement will likely rebuild — and a website field captures the LinkedIn profile the coach will audit before the session. Reading both in advance converts resume work from discovery into editing: the coach arrives knowing which five years need repositioning and which accomplishments are buried in responsibilities.
The Logistics Layer
A contact info block with phone covers identification and scheduling reach. A self notification tells the coach the pre-work has landed, and the confirmation screen sets the client’s expectation — your coach reviews this before we meet; come with nothing prepared. That sentence is the product: the client gets to stop rehearsing.
For engagements running across multiple sessions, recall information carries the intake forward — each subsequent session’s prep references the established story instead of re-asking it. Coaches distributing the link by chat or text send it over WhatsApp, where pre-work actually gets completed. The template sits in the consultation sub-category, alongside the job application templates it often feeds into mid-engagement.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long should the pre-work take?
Fifteen to twenty minutes — long enough for a real story, short enough to finish in one sitting the evening before. If it runs longer, completion becomes homework and homework gets deferred; the story prompt plus targets, audit, and resume sits comfortably inside the window.
What if the client has no clear goals yet?
Then the form did its job. An intake that comes back with fuzzy targets and an honest I’m not sure has handed the coach the session-one agenda: goal discovery, using the story as the raw material. The failure mode isn’t vagueness at intake — it’s discovering the vagueness live, with the clock running.
Does this replace the discovery call?
It replaces the discovery call’s first half. The call that remains is qualitative: chemistry, coaching style, whether the relationship fits. Trying to conduct biography-gathering live and chemistry-checking afterward inverts the value of both — put the facts in the form, keep the human judgment on the call.
Should clients attach multiple resume versions?
Ask for the current one plus, optionally, the version they used for their last application — the differences between the two are often a map of how their self-story has drifted. For clients targeting distinct paths, the upload can accept two files labeled by target; the coach reads the gap, not just the document.
How does the intake serve clients who continue past session one?
As the engagement’s baseline. The story, the audit scores, and the stated constraints become the reference points every later session measures against — and recall carries them forward so each session’s prep builds on the last rather than starting cold. Six months in, the original intake is the before-picture that makes the after-picture legible.