Questions regarding the appropriate level of scale for policy intervention are an important issue for policy stakeholders. The re-emergence of the debate between people and place based policy in recent years has helped frame these questions and in particular has raised issues regarding the most appropriate level of policy focus. This paper contributes to this debate by using a broad notion of employability to drive a conceptual understanding of labour market outcomes and illustrates this with an empirical example. The paper concludes by arguing that labour market policy needs to focus on both people and place based approaches.