Yet there is increasing evidence that a stronger recovery alone might not significantly aid the country’s long-term jobless. Even before the latest monthly job figures are released on Friday, short-term unemployment has fallen to its prerecession level, but long-term unemployment remains more than twice as high as it was in 2007.

New research by Alan B. Krueger, the former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, and his co-authors found that only one in 10 workers who had been unemployed over an extended period of time in a given month between 2008 and 2012 had returned to full-time work a year later.

In part, that might be because the long-term jobless become discouraged and reduce the intensity of their job searches. But it also appears that employers discriminate against the already out-of-work. Rand Ghayad, a researcher with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, performed a study showing that businesses were more likely to call back a working candidate with no relevant experience than a long-term jobless candidate with relevant experience.

This fall, Mr. Sharone and some colleagues founded the Institute of Career Transitions to help understand what workers and policy makers should do.

In its inaugural study, the institute is using long-term unemployed workers, including Mr. Gorelick, as guinea pigs, comparing the outcomes for workers assigned career coaches to the outcomes of those not offered that form of help. “The idea is that in time, we should be able to say whether that intervention is effective, and we will have a lot of qualitative data about the lives of these workers as well,” Mr. Sharone said.

Intensive career counseling might help the long-term unemployed, Mr. Sharone and his colleagues figured. Coaches could help the long-term jobless optimize their résumés, refrain from flagging in their job searches, make new connections and beat common human resources screening techniques. And if career counseling does not reduce the jobless rate, that would be valuable to know too.