Targeting Companies for "Best Fit" Before Targeting "Hidden" Jobs

Standard advice to job seekers is to research a company before an interview. After all, to be competitive you need to impress the potential employer that you did your homework and can therefore intelligently discuss how well you can contribute. The article How to Research a Company Before the Interview covers that quite well.

However, is researching before the interview enough? No, not if you are using a "targeting" approach to finding a job. In both of my books, RELAUNCH! and The Ultimate Job Finding Solution, the focus is on starting your search by finding "best fit" employers who have the types of jobs for which you are searching. By doing that you eliminate wasted time in applying to the wrong employers, for jobs you are unlikely to get, and if you do, where you're not likely to thrive. In effect, you want to narrow your search only to those organizations where you and the employer are likely to be very satisfied.

So how do you do this? First, you use a tool to narrow employers in a geographic area to those that employ people in your occupation. THEN you can do the research as described in the article above on those employers to see where you will further narrow your search. The whole idea is to finally target  "hidden" jobs that exist in work environments that are the best fit for you.

This approach is consistent with finding the "sweet spot", the place where the most passion and meaning for your work will be found. Getting into the sweet spot assumes that the job or occupation you are searching for is consistent with your "best-fit" environment in which to work, as well as your best skills and strongest interests. This is based upon what we call the intersection principle which is described in detail, with examples, in Chapter 7 of RELAUNCH! Much of the rest of the book then addresses how you can achieve the sweet spot throughout the rest of your career and into retirement.