Strategy #24: Identify Prospects, Leads And Targets

When you’re job hunting, you need an opening to go after before anything else happens. Without a raw work opportunity in front of you, your job search is going nowhere fast, so finding the right one as quickly and effectively as possible is critically important. The conventional way of doing this is to wait until an employer has posted a job vacancy and to submit your application through the usual channels. The trouble is that this procedure is riddled with problems.

But there’s a solution which I’m going to tell you about right now, and one that eliminates all of the difficulties that ordinary job hunters endure. In this strategy I’ll introduce you to the mechanics of locating the organisation that will become your principal employment target. Once you’ve done that you can hone in on the specific job you want to do for them and eventually identify and meet with the individual who has the authority to offer you a position.  

I hope you’ve been with me for this series of job-search articles from the beginning. If so, you’ll know that I’ve been outlining the process of finding fantastic work opportunities without any of the challenges that are thrown up if you use a standard job-search strategy. These problems include massive competition from other applicants, considering that there are an average of 250 people going for every openly-advertised corporate opening, for example.

But the hurdles don’t stop there. You have to hope that your resume or CV passes an initial vetting procedure, often conducted by a strictly non-human verification system. If it does, you’ll probably have to go through further screenings and pre-interview checks, normally with some box-checking human resources personnel this time. The luckiest handful of people get invited to interview and this is where the challenge really kicks in. I won’t go over these issues again, seeing as I’ve covered this topic earlier in this series.    

That’s the bad news. The good news is that you can easily circumvent all of these problems by doing things very differently, starting with finding some golden work opportunities before anyone else has done so. In articles 21, 22 and 23 I outlined the theory of my method, and explained what you should consider in advance of getting busy with locating these opportunities. Today’s strategy is about the specific steps you take to do this.

Let me begin by giving you a snapshot of what happens. You start off with an almost limitless number of potential employers and then whittle them down until just one remains. You do this according to certain criteria that I’ll explain shortly, and within the parameters you set for yourself which I’ve already explained. By using a systematic process of elimination, one single potentially-perfect employer appears before you, in theory at any rate.   

The best way to think about this is to imagine using a device that’s a combination of a funnel and a sieve. You shovel lots of material into the wide opening, shake it about a bit and what comes out of the narrow end is the good stuff. In this case, a handful of employment targets will pop out. Shake a bit more and just one will finally emerge, the golden nugget that you’re looking for. This will be the opportunity that’s likely to be the best one for you, the one that represents your winning ticket to the perfect work, whatever that may look like in your eyes.

Much of what follows will be familiar to anyone who works in professional sales but if that doesn’t describe you, don’t worry too much. It’s quite a simple process to understand and it isn’t difficult to implement either. Salespeople need to make sales to be successful, and wasting time and effort on anyone who isn’t likely to buy is a major mistake. They categorise potential buyers in exactly the same way that you’ll categorise potential employers. In ascending order of interest to you, they are qualifiers, suspects, prospects, leads and targets.

A qualifier is any company that fulfils your most basic requirements, usually by dint of business type, market sector, geographical location and so on. There could be a lot of companies here and it could take forever to compile this list so you need to limit the number of qualifying companies by establishing quite rigorous criteria. I’ll be getting to qualifying criteria soon but reckon on listing no more than 500 qualifiers.

A suspect is a top qualifier. The number of companies you put on your suspect list will depend on how demanding you are with your deal-makers and breakers. As a general rule, I’d recommend you include no more than 100 suspects at this stage.

A prospect is one of the top 20 suspects. Your qualifying criteria will be getting progressively more demanding in order to allow any company access to this list.

A lead is one of the top 3 prospects that justify focused research which will happen when you take things to the next stage. I cover this in the next lesson on introductions.

A target is the final company that you’ll approach. This is the one you’ll concentrate your remaining efforts on, engineer a meeting with and deliver your eventual pitch to the hiring decision maker.

Once you’ve arrived at this point, as soon as you have your target employer in your crosshairs, you shift up a gear. This is when you conduct secondary research that reveals details of the precise job you want to do for the employer, plus identifying the name and job title of the final hiring decision-maker. But that’s all to come, and I’ll be talking about these things in upcoming strategies.

Do the numbers that I’ve just mentioned sound huge? Does the idea of creating an initial list of 500 qualifiers seem daunting? The logistics of doing this are much simpler than you might imagine, which essentially boils down to downloading a list of organisations from a search engine or online directory of some sort. This might be a general-purpose one like Google or it could be an industry-specific trade catalogue of the companies that operate in whichever field of work you’re looking at.  

Before you get into listing these businesses, the most important consideration is to establish your qualifying criteria and employer parameters. That’s the first thing to do, well before you think about how to find the details of any potential employers who’ll feature on your lists. This includes your deal-makers and deal-breakers, plus a clear understanding of what the company you might end up working for is buying and what you’re going to be selling them. Look back at my articles numbered 22 and 23 for more on this.

The bar you set for the initial round of research only needs to be high enough to qualify a potential employer for inclusion in your first list. That means up to 500 businesses, or thereabouts, so don’t make life too difficult for yourself at this stage. Once you’ve done this you’re ready to move ahead. Use your deal-makers to screen in the sort of organisations that qualify for inclusion as a qualifier at the broadest level. Your deal breakers will screen out others, but don’t get too picky at this stage. Qualifiers occupy the broadest-possible spectrum and only serve as the cannon fodder for your next round of sifting and sorting.

The mechanics of compiling your list of initial qualifiers isn’t difficult by any means, but it would take me far longer to explain than I’ve got the time or space to do justice to here. I’m sorry to disappoint you but I hope you understand that a short episode like this can only go so far. Similarly, the way you sift and sort these qualifiers so as to reduce their number to 100 suspects is quite straight forward. You then introduce ever-more rigorous rounds of elimination to eventually arrive at 3 leads and then 1 solitary target. This is the company that you’ll eventually approach.

As you might imagine, I give you an exhaustive explanation of how you do all of this in my complete Job Search Masterclass. You’ll have to pay to enrol in this course but if you’re serious about cracking your next job search, it’ll be an investment that repays itself many times over, and I make a money-back guarantee to this effect. You’ll find details at vocationmaster.com.   

OK, that’s about it for this brief introduction to the mechanics of identifying your next employer, all without having to run the gauntlet of a conventional job search with all the attendant problems and difficulties that you can expect. As with other aspects of this topic, I’ll be returning to it down the line.

If you prefer to watch training materials rather than read or listen to them, follow this link to my YouTube channel where you can access the video version of this article;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2LbDlV57Bk&t=10s

And finally, if you have any questions about the issues I raise here, or if you'd like to contact me personally, please get in touch via LinkedIn;

https://www.linkedin.com/in/vocationmaster/