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Finding companies & open jobs that fit you well

What you’ll get out of this chapter

Now that you have both a framework for organizing your search and a resume, it’s time to find some companies you might want to work for.

In this chapter, we’ll first look at how to figure out what types of companies and open jobs would be best for you. Then, we’ll examine how to categorize the new companies you find, and what next action to take for companies in each category. Finally, now that we know what to do when we see a new company, we’ll look at specific strategies for finding good companies, both online and through in-person conversation.

Deciding what you want in your next company and role

Goal and personal example

This is a modification of the “Near Term Priorities” exercise from the excellent In Transition, by Mary Burton and Richard Wedemeyer. The goal is to arrive at a ranked set of your preferences for your next job, which helps before the interview in scouting for jobs and during the interview in convincing people that the company is a good fit for you. Here’s an example output of this exercise from my last job search (some of this won’t make sense yet, but will be explained shortly):

This example fit my preferences at the time, but your preferences will be very different: perhaps job security is extremely important to you, and you don’t care at all about whether you can bike to work or not.

To find out how I used this framework, and how you can come up with your own priorities, read on.

Finding your own priorities

You’ll want at least a distraction-free hour for this exercise. To prepare, you only need to do three things:

Brainstorming what to rank

The first goal is to think of every factor that influences how much you enjoy a job. You’re not ranking them or sorting them right now, just coming up with as many as possible.

Brainstorm factors for at least 10 minutes, even if it feels like you don’t have any left after 3 minutes. For each factor you think of, write it on a piece of paper and put it on the table in no particular order. If you’re stuck, think about specific situations in previous jobs, hobbies, and classes, and what made those situations good or bad for you.

There are some example factors below, but the biggest mistake I see my clients making is focusing too much on the example prompts and not brainstorming enough about what matters in their own life. So if you enjoy or hate using a certain skill or program, care about working with a certain type of people, or anything else you can think of that makes you happy or sad, add that to the list. If you might care about a few factors under one topic, like both company size and company industry, split those into separate cards.

Ranking one-on-one

Now that you’ve got many factors scattered around on your surface, it’s time to rank them.

Looking at this many factors is overwhelming, so we’ll make one comparison at a time. The left side of your surface will be things you need most, and your right side will be things you don’t care about as much.

Pick up any two post-its, and decide which of those two things you care about more. Put them in a line in that order, left to right.

Pick up another post-it, and find its right place on the line by comparing it to exactly one other concept. So if the order right now is A B C D, and you have post-it E, you might:

Only make one-on-one comparisons, which will let you focus on simpler choices instead of being overwhelmed by the many options.

Splitting into categories

Now you’ve got a long line of post-its. Congratulations! The hard part is over, and you should have more insight into what you’ll be looking for in a company and job when you come across an open position.

There are a few things left to make this more useful for you. First, pick out the first segment of your post-it line that’s most important, the factors you really need to have to be happy in a job. This might be the first three notes or the first ten. Choose as few as you truly need, because you’re not going to consider taking a job that doesn’t fit all of these criteria.

Then, we’ll categorize these into “Required & easy to check” and “Required & needs investigation”. To do that, think about if you can tell purely from Internet research if the requirement on that post-it is fulfilled. For example, commute distance is easy to check, since you can look at a map. On the other hand, knowing if you respect your coworkers is hard to check. You’ll need to talk to someone else and see how you feel. Put things in the “easy to check” category if they take less than five minutes to check, and you don’t need someone else’s help to do it.

This split is important because the “easy to check” category is how you can quickly screen a job description to see if you’re interested, and the “needs investigation” category gives you the most important factors to look into when you’re interviewing.

The final split you’ll make is between “Nice to have” and “Trade off for other priorities”. There are probably some things at the end of your list that you don’t care about. It’s good to put these in a “Trade off” category, since you might be able to negotiate later for something you do care about by giving up some of the things you don’t care about. For example, if your spouse has great insurance covering the whole family, maybe you can get a higher salary while not being covered by your new employer’s health plan.

I’d recommend taking a picture of your hard work, and then typing this all up in Trello, a free card sorting program that will let you edit and move things around as you think of new things or change your mind because of what you learn from job searching. You can keep your notes from the process in the Reflection section of your folders.

Finally, most people who run this output by someone who knows them very well, like a spouse or close friend, end up making some changes based on what that person points out. I’d highly recommend running this by another person you’re close to before you fully commit to the conclusions.

Classifying and acting on your companies

Now that you’ve got your list of what you’re looking for in a company, let’s examine what to do when you come across a company you might be interested in applying to. I recommend bucketing companies quickly into one of four categories, which you can track on your organizing spreadsheet. Note that companies should move between categories as you collect more information.

Category 1: No

“I don’t want to work here.”

Goal: Don’t spend more time on this company

If you become reasonably sure that a company wouldn’t be a good fit for you, your goal is to avoid spending any more of your time on them. Withdraw from interviews politely, or don’t apply in the first place.

You can save a lot of time by quickly moving companies to this category if they don’t fit the required parts of the “Finding your own priorities” exercise earlier in this chapter.

Category 2: Lukewarm

“This company probably isn’t the best fit for what I want, but it’s possible it could be good.”

Goal: Ethically train yourself as needed

These companies are not interesting enough that they’re a priority for you, but interesting enough that there’s a chance things would work out.

These are your best bet for interview practice, because you can ethically go through the process but aren’t as attached to the outcome. You’ll want to interview at these companies a lot as you get started. Once you have enough practice interviewing, you can apply to them less and less.

As you find out more about these companies, they’ll become a “No” or “Promising”, the next category. I’ve taken a job before where a “Lukewarm” company for me turned out to be my overall favorite when I investigated more, so keep an open mind!

Category 3: Promising

“This employer seems like a good fit, but I haven’t vetted it enough to be sure.”

Goal: Vet the company enough to learn if you can move to the “Good Fit” category

In this category, you might start getting very excited about the companies. They’re here because they pass a lot of your criteria from the “Finding your own priorities” exercise, because you’ve heard good things about them, or because you enjoy their product.

The goal here is to collect information, through research and at least one direct interview, to see if it is worth working hard to succeed in applying to and getting an offer from the company.

Note that it's not possible to know if the company is in the next category, “Good fit”, until you speak with people that have worked or currently work there. No matter how promising a company’s website or job posting may seem, without knowing things like who your manager will be, you can't really tell what the work environment will be like.

Category 4: Good fit

“I have vetted reasons to believe this company is a good fit for me.”

Goal: Get a job offer

After you have personal experience talking with a current or former employee, and you’ve determined the company probably meets your requirements, you can call it a good fit. Usually you won’t be sure of this until midway through the interviews.

It takes a lot of effort to move a company into this category, so try your hardest to get an offer once it’s there!

Scouting companies to add to your list

Now that you have a way of bucketing companies with next action steps, it’s time to look into ways of finding companies to examine. In the next chapters, we’ll then examine how to find individuals from those companies, get them to agree to a conversation, and run a great informational interview so that you get invited to a first-round assessment interview.

Using job search sites

Here are some possible job sites to explore as you look for companies. I recommend trying two to three at a time, and if one isn't it effective get rid of it and try to find another.

If you find a site that's helpful and isn’t on this list, please let me know at firstroundinterviews@unusuallydifficult.com. I maintain a growing list of useful sites for people in specific industries and job roles, which I’ll link to as an online resource once it gets too large for the book.

Generally, if you find a promising job opening via these sites, make sure to check if the company has its own hiring page before applying. There might be more or better information there than on the job search site.

Additionally, there are a lot of internships and contract jobs in some fields. Try to limit your search if that’s not what you’re looking for.

Generally useful sites

Role-specific sites

For role-specific job board sites, let me know what roles are most interesting to you, and I’ll add sites if they’re a good fit.

Situation-specific sites

For situation-specific job board sites, let me know what roles are most interesting to you, and I’ll add sites if they’re a good fit.

Finding similar companies

Once you have some interesting companies on your list, it’s worth seeing if they have competitors that might be good to apply to as well, since that way all of your industry research can be used multiple times. Three of my favorite ways to find similar companies are:

In-person conversations

Talking to almost everyone you meet about the kinds of companies you’re looking for can help you expand your search. Since you’re not asking them for much of their time, just a few seconds thinking about what companies they know, this is not a burdensome request.

My main tip for this interaction is to talk about the companies you want to work for in specific terms that match how other people think about companies.

I tested this out in my own job search, at a time when I was open to working in many different industries. When I said that I was looking for jobs with a great team and a strong opportunity to grow, people didn't give me many ideas, because that's not how they mentally classified companies, the same way it's easier to think of words that start with the letter K than to think of words that have K as their third letter.

When I picked a subset of those industries and I said I was interested in software having to do with manufacturing, recruiting, and public speaking, I got a lot of ideas from people that way because it jogged their memory, even though that list wasn't the full spectrum my interests. By picking any three of the many industries you’re interested in when you talk to people, you will probably get more ideas than saying you’re open to anything. You can mix up the three industries from conversation to conversation so that over time you represent all of your interests.

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