A friend of mine introduced me to Jigsaw and lemme tell ya, it’s full o’ win.

Jigsaw is a business database that houses the contact information for just about any company you can imagine. You can pay for or “trade” contacts to access just about anyone in business. Lots of sales folks use it for lead gen and so forth, but we’ll be using it a lil differently.

First of all, grab an account. I usually use a seperate gmail addy for all of my registrations so I don’t get spammed to death with newsletters and such.

Next, once you’ve logged in, go to the COMPANIES link at the top of the navigation bar. Click on the dropdown link for FIND COMPANIES.

Next, decide what city you want to look for work. It drills down by country and then city or metro area.

Pick off the industry that you are interested in and then the subsets within that industry. If you don’t have much experience, start by looking for companies that sell products you like. What kind of people do you like to be around? What could you talk about all day if you could?

Identify the size of the company that you wish to work for (based on yearly revenue) and click search.

VOILA.

Now bookmark the URLs for each company in your list. Don’t visit the companies site or even read anything, you just want a giant list of URLS for companies that you may be interested in. Save them with a social bookmarking tool or better yet, use Firefox with the EVERNOTE CLIPPER.(You could pay someone on Elance $50 bucks to do this for you)

Do this for a few different industries and company sizes. That’s the only way you’ll get a feel for what’s really out there.

After you’ve pulled a nice handful of companies in your bookmarking folder, visit each companies website and decide whether their corporate culture and yours mesh.

Ask yourself, what is their website selling to their potential business partners and vendors? What are they trying to sell you on in their careers section? I found one company who listed casual Fridays and had pictures of them out drinking martinis and kayaking together.

A Few Thoughts

For most people I know, bigger does not necessarily mean better when it comes to employer. Keep in mind though, that the smaller the operation you pick (>2million/year revenue) the more specialized your skill will need to be to warrant them paying you a decent wage/salary. These guys are taxed at 39% or somesuch and to pull you on full-time you are going to need to be worth all of the taxes, benefits etc that come with taking on employees. Bigger companies can absorb this cost.

To get an idea of where you might fit, Jigsaw breaks down the department data for companies thusly:

Sales

Marketing

Finance and Admin

Human Resources

Support

Engineering and Research

Operations

IT and IS

Other

They also break down the staff as C-level, VP-Level, Director-Level, Manager-Level and Staff (You ever interviewed for a sleazy sales job where they wanted a “book of business” to plunder? Well now you have a giant one.)

Next, pay someone who knows what they are doing to juice up your resume and if you are attractive, send a picture. I’m sure plenty of people will disagree with this, but I’ve seen this tactic work behind the scenes at the past 3 companies I worked for.

Next, write a badass cover letter and send it to the guy who could hire you and tell him you want the job. Bypass human resource departments and admins if you can, afterall, their job is to weed you out. Find the department manager’s email by googling different combinations of their name and the city the business is in. Or pay for it on Jigsaw.

I’m in the process of using this very technique as we speak. My product is taking a lil bit longer to iron all the kinks out than I thought and consulting gigs here in Dallas have dried up quite a bit.

Finally, I’ll be flying out to LA and the Orange Curtain within the next few weeks, if anyone would like to grab a drink hit me up at admin @ phillipmarlow.com. If anybody has any luck with this method, please shoot me an email so we can tell everybody how you did it. Good luck : )