Last summer he paid $3,000 to take an intensive eight-week course in job hunting with Boston career-coaching firm Hayden Wilder, and for the past five months he's been working at Boston-based commercial real estate powerhouse Spaulding & Slye. Hayden Wilder's coaches, he says, "teach you how to sell your strengths. It's not something you learn in college."

Evidently not. According to Hayden Wilder's research, human resources managers say that 85 percent of new grads are woefully unprepared to be interviewed, much less hired, for real, grown-up jobs. With the rise of so-called helicopter parenting (hovering baby-boomer parents anxious to coax and cajole their offspring toward success at every stage), a mini-industry is springing up to take kids raised on test-prep tutoring and teach them interview skills.

The year-old Hayden Wilder specializes exclusively in training recent grads. But an increasing number of established career-counseling firms that used to cater only to people in mid-career are now tailoring programs to include them. That makes a lot of sense: 1.4 million new grads this year adds up to a lot of potential customers.

"Parents now hire help for their kids all along the way—tutors, trainers, coaches," says D.A. Hayden, who, like partner Michael Wilder, is a longtime marketing maven. "But after college, until now, there really have been few options."

The biggest mistake fledgling job seekers make, according to Wilder: "They just list stuff chronologically on their resumes. There's no story there. We teach them that a resume doesn't just tell what you've done, it tells what you can do."

Borden, for instance, didn't see how his varsity lacrosse experience might interest a job interviewer—until the folks at Hayden Wilder showed him how to turn it into a riff on teamwork.

"I just didn't know what employers would be looking for," says Borden.

If $3,000 seems like a lot for that kind of advice, consider one recent poll that says almost 60 percent of new college grads plan to move back in with their folks until they can get a good enough job to live on their own. Sometimes you've got to spend money to save money.

From the May 29, 2006 issue