Eight Week Relaunch Program Checklist by RelaunchDesk

Before week one: intake and paperwork

Get the coaching agreement signed before the first working sessionInclude the scope line that says you provide career coaching and not legal or immigration advice. Good looks like a signed agreement in hand before you see her resume.
Collect the last three paid roles and the full unpaid recordAsk specifically for volunteer treasurer work, school board seats, PTA budgets, contract projects and family business admin. She will not offer these unless you name them.
Ask her to describe the gap years in her own words, in writingTwo paragraphs, sent before the call. What she wrote is the raw material for the gap sentence and it tells you whether she is still apologizing.
Name the household constraints out loud and write them downWeekly hours available, commute limit, earliest start date, salary floor, and who covers caregiving if she takes a full time role. Vague constraints resurface as a declined offer in week nine.
Agree what finishing means before you startFirst interview, three interviews, or an accepted offer. Programs fail on expectations more often than on effort, and this sentence belongs in the agreement.

Weeks one to three: evidence and target

Build an evidence inventory before touching the resumeEvery project, budget, headcount and outcome she can name, paid or not, with a number attached where one exists. Aim for at least twenty entries before you write a line of resume copy.
Name forty target employers, not job titlesReal companies she would accept a role at, with size and location noted. Under thirty and the pipeline math will not produce an interview inside the program.
Draft the gap sentence and make her say it out loud three timesOne or two sentences, factual, forward looking, no apology. Good looks like a sentence she can deliver without her voice changing.
Rebuild the resume for the parser first, then for the readerStandard section headings, no text in tables or headers, dates in a consistent format, target job title language in the top third. Then make a second version for human eyes.
Reset the LinkedIn headline to the target role, not the last oneRecruiters filter on current title language. A headline naming a role she left eleven years ago removes her from searches she would otherwise pass.

Weeks four to six: outreach and applications

Set a weekly application number and hold her to itPick a count she can sustain against her real hours, usually four to eight tailored applications. A number she agreed to is enforceable, a vague commitment is not.
Send warm outreach before cold applications every weekFormer colleagues, parents from the same school, industry groups, alumni. Warm routes convert at a multiple of cold ones, so spend the first hour of the week there.
Log every application on the day it goes outCompany, role, route, date, contact. A log filled in on Sunday from memory is fiction, and it makes response rates impossible to read.
Review the pipeline together in every sessionOpen the log first, before feelings. Count applications sent, replies received and interviews scheduled, and say the numbers out loud.
Fix exactly one screening blocker per weekA knockout question answered badly, a missing certification, a resume version that parses wrong. One at a time keeps momentum instead of triggering another rewrite.
Watch for the week five silenceThe common stall is a client who stops sending after the first rejections. If outreach drops to zero for ten days, call it directly in the next session rather than waiting.

Weeks seven and eight: interviews and handoff

Run one recorded mock interview and score itRecord it, watch it with her, and pick two specific fixes. Watching herself answer the gap question is worth more than any amount of your feedback.
Build six stories in one fixed structureSituation, action, result, with a number in the result. Six covers most first round questions, and the unpaid work belongs in at least two of them.
Prepare the money answer against a real floorShe needs a range she can say without flinching and a floor she will not cross. Practice the answer to what were you making before, since it is the hardest one after a long break.
Debrief every interview within twenty four hoursQuestions asked, what she stumbled on, next step and date. The detail evaporates by day three and it is your best coaching material.
Write the ninety day plan before the program endsWeekly application count, target list additions, and who she reports her numbers to. A program that ends without a continuation plan is where placements get lost.

How to use it

Run this as a live document with each client rather than as a one time audit. Coaches who use it well open it in every session, tick what actually happened, and let the unticked items drive the agenda. That habit alone removes the most common failure in relaunch work, which is a pleasant weekly conversation that produces no applications.

It also works as a sales asset. Showing a prospective client the full eight week sequence in an intake call answers the question she is really asking, which is whether you have done this before. Coaches routinely tell us this page closes more discovery calls than a pitch does, because it is specific enough to be checkable.

Send me the editable copy

Send it to yourself as an editable file you can adapt to your own program length and hand to a second coach.

Questions about this document

Can I use this for a twelve week program instead?

Yes, and most coaches should. Stretch the outreach block from three weeks to six rather than adding more evidence work, because extra weeks at the front end are where clients stall. The sequence stays identical.

Should the client see this checklist?

Show her the stage names and the current week, not the whole document. Clients who see all four stages at once tend to jump ahead to interview preparation before they have a target list worth applying against.

What if a client refuses to build the target list?

That refusal is almost always fear of choosing, and it is the single strongest predictor that she will stall. Build the first ten companies with her in session rather than assigning it, and the rest usually follows within a week.

One client is a checklist, nine at once is a caseload

Running this sequence with a single returning client works fine on paper. Run it across nine and by week five you will not remember which of them has logged no outreach in ten days. A demo shows the same eight week order working as a board, with the target list, the application log and the interview debriefs already sitting where this checklist tells you to keep them.

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The eight week relaunch program checklist