Hi, everyone.
It's Andy LaCivita, founder of milewalk and the milewalk Academy, and award-winning author
of the Hiring Prophecies.
In this week's episode tips for work and life we're going to talk about targeting companies
in your job search.
It always amazes me when people want to change jobs or when they're looking for jobs they
look for jobs.
I understand that might be what you need, but I think you join a company you don't join
a job.
If you join the right company you're not going to have the job you joined for for very long
and I mean that in a good way.
Great companies really know how to elevate their employees.
Now whether you are desperately in need of a job or you need a different job or you want
to look at the market and just perhaps find another organization that will help you grow
more as a professional.
I'd like to talk about how do you target companies instead of targeting jobs?
I always believe I'd rather be a player on a Superbowl team than the ace pitcher on a
major league baseball team that goes 62 wins and 100 losses.
I really think that that's going to make a much better impact on my overall professional
development if I work with a company with that kind of pedigree.
I've outlined eight ways that I think are absolutely fantastic that you can use to target
companies.
Let's get right into it.
Number one, first thing you do is just think for a second.
You have a good appreciation of what you are doing or what you would like to do, simply
start making a list of the organizations that you know, whether you know them well or whether
you've heard of them just organizations that you're going to investigate further.
Just think about who are the companies that you think could use your talent.
If they have bad reputations you don't have to put them on the list, but just start making
a list.
The second thing that I would do is don't knock Google.
A good old-fashioned Google search will yield an awful lot of information and the first
thing is very obvious, you can simply search for best companies to work for in this industry.
There's a number of articles and insight and books and things that will come up.
The second thing you can do with Google is you can actually set up Google alerts.
As you start to grow that list of organizations that you want to investigate you can put a
Google alert out there and, as funny as this is going to sound, if you don't know how to
do that just Google how do I set up a Google alert.
That's another great one.
Third, let's talk about call this sources, but really I'm sure it has many names, but
really I'm speaking about information that is out there in the market that will give
you insight into companies.
Now there's different types of companies.
There's publicly-held companies and there's privately-held companies.
If the company is publicly held the security and exchange site they have a system called
Edgar.
If the company's publicly traded it will have documentation like its 10(q) and its 10(k).
These are annual quarterly reports that you can look at to see what the company is doing,
who it considers its competition, what new products or services it's targeting, how products
and services that it's offering have performed, these are great sources of information.
If it's a privately-held company that information is not so readily available, but there are
systems or subscriptions or books or magazines.
One that comes to mind is Hoovers.
That might be a paid subscription, but sometimes these sites offer you free subscriptions for
a few weeks or 10 days or something like that.
You might want to take advantage of something like that.
One of my absolute favorite places to start though, number four, the best of lists.
Companies, magazines, books, these are published on an annual basis.
You've probably heard of them, Forbes has them, Inc Magazine has them, they have the
Inc 500 and the Inc 5000.
These are the fastest growing privately-held companies that are growing, need great people
regardless of whether they're publicly advertising them or not.
Those are some ideas, there's the best 100 companies to work for.
There are so many of them.
As a matter of fact, in this post I have included a large list of my favorite lists and all
the links to them.
All you need to do is download the available freebie in this post and you'll have that
list.
Number five, books and blogs.
Follow authors, follow bloggers.
They're constantly commenting on industry trends, companies, who's doing well in the
market, where they think the market is going or where they think that industry is going,
so that's a great one.
Number six, LinkedIn.
I'm going to give LinkedIn its own category primarily because within LinkedIn you can
search for companies, you can review their company pages.
The best thing about LinkedIn is you can see who you're connected to that might work at
that organization or who they're connected to, so that network and the relationship that
you have with people that work there is also something that I would want to become familiar
with because they might be able to get you in as a referral, but at a minimum they might
be able to provide you some information on what's going on inside the company.
I think that that's a great one.
I separated LinkedIn from number seven, which let's talk about the boards.
Many of these job boards have descriptions on companies or the types of companies or
the industries.
Take a look at the different job boards that are most effective for whatever your function
is and look to see their reviews on the companies.
How many job openings do you they have?
Are they growing?
These are additional indicators.
Any one of these shouldn't be used by itself in a vacuum, but I think the job boards are
a great supplement to the other half a dozen that I already mentioned.
Then finally number eight is company evaluation sites.
These are sites like Glassdoor or Vault or Wetfeet or other subscriptions or free sites
like this that allow employees and employers to go out and discuss what's happening in
the company and you're allowed to review the company.
There they are.
There's eight of them.
Think, Google search, sources, best of lists, books and bloggers, LinkedIn, the job boards,
and company evaluation sites.
I hope this gets you started in the right direction.
Until next week have a great one.