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Several career experts recommend that you create a list of targeted companies; 10-20+ companies you believe will be ideal for you and could use someone with your skill sets. There are several methods you can employ to develop your list. This article will share some of the approaches you can use.

Locate Company Lists

There are two free online sources (Fortune and Manta) you can use to locate public and/or private companies in your desired geographical areas.

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Click here to access the Fortune 500 list and select the appropriate state in the upper left hand corner. Next copy the list, paste it in Notepad or another text editor, and save it. Next follow these steps to import this list into an Excel spreadsheet.

• 1. Open the text file in Excel and this should pull up the text import wizard.
• 2. Make sure Delimited is selected and click next.
• 3. Make sure the columns are nicely separated in Data Preview, click next, and click finish.
• 4. Now filter your Excel spreadsheet by your desired cities.

Visit Manta.com to generate a list of both public and private companies in your desired geographical locations by following the steps below.

• 1. Register and activate your account.
• 2. Click on the US link in the upper left of the screen.
• 3. Input a city or zip code in the Search All U.S. Companies field.
• 4. Refine your results (using the field on the right of your screen) by company revenue, number of employees, public or private companies, location type, and so on.
• 5. Click search to view the list of companies.
• 6. Also scroll down to All Categories and click on the relevant classifications to locate companies by desired industries.

You should also check with the newspaper companies located in your targeted regions to see if they have a list of the top public, private, and minority and women-owned businesses. For example, the Dallas Morning News provides this information. Click here to view these lists.

Gather Company Description, Contact, and Executive Information

I recommend you check with your local library and/or alumni associations to see if you have free online access to Hoovers, Reference USA, or any other company related databases. For each of your targeted companies, you will need to input the physical address, phone number, description, and names of senior executives in your spreadsheet or database.

If you do not have access to any of these databases, you can use visit each company’s website to acquire this information. You can also call the company’s main number and ask for the name of the appropriate hiring manager. A few of my previous articles discussed how to do this based off of your experience level. You can also visit Hoovers.com and conduct a search by company name to acquire the address and phone number, top competitors, and senior executive names for several of your public companies.

Categorize Your Companies

Next you need to classify your companies as either A, B, C, or D firms. Below are several lists you can use to help with this process.

• Fortune Most Admired Companies – you can locate the companies in your targeted areas, by visiting this site, selecting the appropriate state, and viewing the results.
• Vault Rankings – you can visit this site and locate top companies by accounting, law, consulting, diversity, banking, consumer products, and so on.
• You can also conduct Google searches for “best companies for women,” “best companies for diversity,” and so on to pull up other lists.
• Finally, you can check with the local newspapers in your desired geographical regions. For example, the Dallas Morning News published the Top 100 Best places to work in Dallas-Fort Worth. Click here to view this report.

In conclusion, you now have a step-by-step process you can use to either refine or create a targeted company list.

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