It is an indisputable but conveniently overlooked fact that trait-and-factor career counseling was widely practiced in the United States at least 35 years before Frank Parsons provided this service and that the practitioners were phrenologists. This article proposes the reasons why career counseling arose in phrenology at that time and argues that the eminent phrenologist Nelson Sizer, rather than Frank Parsons, is the real founder of the field.