Targeting Employers (Just ASK!)
Strategies
As you continue your efforts in the “Searching” phase of Just ASK! consider these questions:
- How do I identify potential employers that might be of interest to me?
- How many employers should I identify?
- What do I do with that information once I have identified them?
Employers are most commonly classified by three key parameters:
- Industry
- Location
- Size
By Industry
Once you’ve decided on what you want to do, give some thought to what industries you are interested in. Some industries are growing, some are stable, and some are shrinking. (The same can be said of occupations.) The greatest opportunities tend to be in organizations that are growing rapidly within equally expanding industries.
The kind of information that is useful at this stage includes identification of industries by name, industry overviews and trends, key industry segments, and the job outlook.
To research industries, explore the following resources:
By Location
If you are focused on gaining employment in a particular geographical area, it is helpful to identify both the main and the growing industries in that area. If you are focusing more on a particular industry, it is useful to identify where that industry is concentrated around the country (or world).
To research locations:
By Size
The most common ways to measure an employer’s size is either by annual revenue/sales or by number of employees. Are you interested in working for a large, global organization that employs thousands of people and has revenues or a budget in the billions of dollars annually? How about small organizations with revenues up to $100 million? How about somewhere in between?
1 | 2 >