19 Creative Ways To Build Your Target Company List For Your Job Search

Lisa Rangel

As your job search consultant, I aim to provide you 19 creative ways to build your target company list, so you can find your own job leads. This way, you are taught how to fish and you are not be dependent on third party recruiters and job boards. Here, I expand on the target company list building examples I provided in my previous LinkedIn article (“How to Build A List of Target Companies” – Spring 2012), and outline additional, proven steps that you can use immediately. These tactics have been used to build target company lists for current job search practice clients and when I built a recruitment practice in my earlier career. Check out this list:

(1)     Create a Wish List of target companies where you have always wanted to work.

If you are going to conduct a job search, you might as well think BIG, right, and aim to work where you want to work? Think about what characteristics and accolades those target companies have that inspire you to want to work for them. When writing down those traits, use those ideas to spring board your thinking to come up with other target companies that seem to embody those same traits and philosophies.

(2)     Apply The CAVACtm Model to build your Target Company List.

What is the CAVAC™ Model? The CAVAC™ Model is a methodical, hub-and-spoke thought process that helps the job seeker create a stream of new ideas pertaining to potential companies where they may find their next position. The C’s are the company’s clients and competitors. The V is vendors. And the A’s are associations and affiliate companies that compliment the target company’s business.

For each company on your initial Wish List, place the employer or target company name in the middle of the diagram below. Then write out the clients, associations, affiliates, competitors and clients that come to mind and from your research to expand your list. Each company listed can be a possible entry on your developed target list.  I will use one of my previous employers as an example, as if I was looking for a new position.

THE CAVAC™ MODEL

(3)     Expand your list.

Now for each company in the CAVAC™ sections, take a blank CAVAC template and one of the companies from the outer circles into the center. For instance, put Bullhorn, the Applicant Tracking System Vendor, into the center as a Target Company, and research, who are the competitors, associations, vendors, affiliates and clients of this organization. This exercise can go on and on, ensuring you are never short on Target Companies.

Ways 4-19 and the complete article