Two benefits you're ending for the end of the employee lifecycle
- Claire Baker
- Sep 6
- 3 min read
In my experience, most teams planning an exit or a reduction in force wish they could do more. They just don’t know how.
Someone facing a transition has two priorities:
Protecting their livelihood
Access to healthcare
These solutions to each that cost less than your monthly coffee budget:
Kept - COBRA management with a soul
COBRA is a maze. Marketplace plans are confusing. The letter explaining your options takes weeks to arrive and is written in code. Company-sponsored subsidies can have hidden traps. State subsidies are equally inscrutable. The people on the other end of the 1-800 number talk like they’ve been lobotomized.
The person on your team who the former employee might reach out to with questions is often the same person who delivered the bad news.
Result: Many former employees have no reliable, compassionate resources to guide them on how to keep their healthcare without wrecking their finances.
Here’s what I really like about Kept:
🧭 They give guidance about whether to choose COBRA or a Marketplace plan based on the employee’s actual usage patterns. No “we cannot advise” cop-outs. This is the solid advice that me or your friend who actually knows about this stuff would give you.
❤️🩹 They prioritize compassion. Kept’s team is built with “bedside manner” in mind. No more reaching out to the person who canned you for advice. You can even schedule an appointment for a time that’s convenient for the whole family to talk to them together. It’s the little things that give you dignity.
⏯️ They make sure the end of a subsidy is a qualifying event so you’re not locked into unaffordable COBRA premiums when the subsidy runs out.
🔌 They pull employee data directly from your HRIS and handle the payments logistics for you, so it’s one less thing for your team to worry about.
And it costs less than $1 per employee per month.
Callings.ai - An ATS for job seekers
Everyone’s talking about the AI arms race with resumes, but the differentiator isn’t the resume. It’s the human follow-up.
Most job seekers have trouble just keeping track of all the applications they’ve sent. They're completely lost on how to follow up. They have no idea who to reach out to or what to say, so they freeze.
Here’s what I really like about Callings.ai:
🗂️ They keep all of your applications organized in one place... that isn’t a spreadsheet. You can import your outbound applications into the dashboard with a single click, regardless of where the job was posted.
📌 It identifies which opportunities are most worth applying for and helps tailor your resume to get past the AI screeners. It also gives you a heads-up if the opportunity probably aren’t worth the effort.
🤝 It suggests who to reach out to on LinkedIn and what to actually say, so you don’t get lost overthinking every word (or chicken out before hitting “send”).
It only costs $150 per exit, or a few cents per employee per month to offer it to anyone leaving your company.
Both of these tools are available to companies for less than a dollar per employee per month. They can transform someone’s exit from cold paperwork to meaningful support.
If it rips your heart out to see what’s happening in the job market, Callings and Kept are two things you can offer right now that make a real difference.
(Not a paid promotion. I just really believe in what these companies are doing.)
Want to find out what other benefits providers I'm into? Let's talk about what might be right for you.
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