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When looking at career interventions, one-on-one career counseling is one of the most effective and firmly established types of intervention. Furthermore, career counseling process quality has been validated as a predictor of job seekers' reemployment. To elucidate the underlying components of a high-quality counseling process, the effects of counselor behavior in mandatory counseling sessions at three Swiss job centers are investigated. Based on a transfer of psychotherapeutic effectiveness research into the domain of career counseling, three behavior categories are proposed as components of a high-quality counseling process: providing structured guidance during the counseling process, providing personalized support, and activating job seekers' resources. Scientific observers rated these counselor behavior categories in 32 counseling sessions. The ratings of "providing structured guidance" predicted job seekers' reemployment speed at a correlation of 0.58. The measured effect equals yearly savings of 831 million Swiss Francs CHF (US$839) in Swiss unemployment benefits. The correlations with the other two behavior category ratings were in the same direction but nonsignificant.

One-on-one career counseling has been established as the most effective type of career intervention. Prior research results have suggested that process quality determines counseling success. In this multilevel study, career counseling process quality is validated as a predictor of job seekers' reemployment at three Swiss job centers. Supervisors' evaluations of the process quality of mandatory counseling sessions predicted faster reemployment of the 444 counseled job seekers by 18.9 working days on average. This effect equals yearly savings of 418 million Swiss Francs CHF (US$ 422 million) in Swiss unemployment benefits. While in many countries, the counseling of the unemployed is predominantly an administrative process, the findings should encourage investments in process quality of career counseling to promote reemployment. Furthermore, the study calls for further research on the underlying factors of career counseling process quality and the respective career counselor behaviors.