A target company list is a curated list of 20-35 companies that match your criteria – location, size, and industry. I often tell job seekers that this research document can be really valuable in your job search efforts because it is essentially your job search roadmap.

Need to hone your target list?

Building a strategic target company list takes time! Some job seekers, spend 2-3 full working days diving into viable companies before they launch into their job search marketing and networking efforts.

We can find decision-makers!

A lot of our clients don’t have experience prospecting and feel overwhelmed at the idea of creating a target company list. We are experienced prospectors and project managers. We have access to the best paid tools like Crunchbase, Hunter, and LinkedIn Premium, and use the latest free resources like TheOrg and Angel to effectively gather intel on future potential targets.

We start our engagement by asking you to share your job search parameters, ideal future job title, and a few companies of interest. We use your preferences to create a custom spreadsheet where we will put relevant company information and contacts. (This spreadsheet can be used by you later as a CRM to track your personal outreach and networking leads.)

We will identify:

  • A minimum of 10-15 target companies. We start with the 2-3 companies that you identified and then look on Crunchbase at competitor organizations + we will do a LinkedIn search of individuals with your target job title who are no longer at the target organization to see where people are finding jobs.
  • An organizational chart. If a public organizational chart is available on the company website or on the Org.com we will put it in the project folder for you to review.
  • Who we think your boss and/or peers would be if you worked for the organization. We will use LinkedIn Premium to search for who we think your boss will be based on the job target that you identified. We will search Hunter.io and Crunchbase Premium for public information. We will try to find a LinkedIn account and/or email address for every person so that you can send a targeted outreach message.
  • A minimum of 5 recruiters. We will identify a minimum of 5 corporate or search firm recruiters that we think might be of interest. We will share their contact information and any relevant insights into how they work.
  • Custom Insights. You can ask us to pull annual revenue, board of directors, the last annual letter to shareholders, etc. When you complete the intake form, you can share how you want us to support your research efforts.

There are some limitations to our research. While we have excellent search and project management skills, we can only present information to you that is publicly available. We will also ask our clients to give us wide enough parameters so that we can be successful (for example: if you told us that you only want to work for a Fortune 100 company + you have to live in a small, rural community, we would struggle to find leadership opportunities).

Sample Project

As you can see from the sample research project in the image above, our test client indicated that they were only interested in high-growth health + tech companies that are at $100M+ in revenue/pre-IPO (but would consider AWS and Microsoft), based in the Pac Northwest but with a focus in Seattle and that their future target title is “senior product manager.”  We took this information and created a Google folder with the spreadsheet + individual folders for most of the companies on the list. At the request of the test client, we pulled a PDF of the LinkedIn profiles and organizational charts for the folders. 

Interested in more information? Reach out to Sarah at Sarah@briefcasecoach.com

Limited Time Beta Test Pricing

Transparently, we are testing this as a service offering. Our introductory pricing is $75/hr for custom target research which includes the use of all of our paid tools and subscriptions.

Projects will be sold in 5-hour increments. All of the work is done by highly skilled members of the Briefcase Coach team who take client confidentiality very seriously. This is all done in-house– no research is being outsourced to off-shore freelancers.


Let us help you land a new job!

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