How to find forty companies nobody else is applying to

If I asked you to name companies in the field you want to work in, you would get to about eight before you started struggling.

So would everyone else applying for the same jobs. Which is why four hundred people apply to one role at a company everyone has heard of, and two people apply to a role at its supplier.

The problem is not that you are bad at applying. It is that you are only applying to companies you can name, and the list of companies you can name is short and identical to everybody else's.

Almost everyone now uses AI for the writing half of the job search. Cover letters, CV rewrites, tailoring. Which is exactly why none of that works anymore. When four hundred applications have been through the same tidying process, the writing stops being a differentiator.

The half nobody uses it for is finding where to apply. That half still works, because almost nobody is doing it.

Before you start: the sentence

None of this works if you cannot say what you want in one sentence.

Not a good job in marketing. Something with a shape to it, specific enough that a stranger could recognise the thing if they saw it. Three parts: what you are doing now, what you want, and the constraint that makes it real.

Final year at Leeds studying English, looking for a junior social role at a small company in London, starting next summer.

That sentence is the input for everything below. If yours is vague, the output will be too.

Step one: describe the work, not the industry

The mistake is asking for a list of companies in an industry, because you get the eight you already knew plus a few you had heard of.

Describe the job you want to do instead, and ask who has that job.

> List UK companies under 200 people whose in-house team makes their own social video rather than using an agency. For each one, tell me what they do, roughly how big they are, and why you think the content is made in-house.

You are describing a working arrangement rather than a sector, so the answer is not a list of famous names. It is a list of companies that happen to be organised in a way that would suit you.

Do this two or three times with different phrasings. Change the size, change the constraint, change what the team does. Each pass surfaces different companies.

Step two: ask who supplies them

This is the step that produces the actual value.

Every company you can name buys things from companies you cannot. Agencies, studios, production companies, tools, contractors. Those suppliers hire the same kinds of people, and almost nobody applies to them because nobody has heard of them.

> Take that list. Who are the production companies, studios, agencies and freelance networks these firms hire to make content? UK based.

The famous company has forty applicants for a junior role. Its supplier has two. Same work, same skills, and the second one will actually read your application.

Step three: check it yourself

Do not skip this.

Models invent companies. They get sizes wrong, they place firms in the wrong country, and they will describe a business that closed two years ago in the present tense.

Open every name. Does it exist, is it the size the model said, does it have a careers page, has anything happened there in the last year. Roughly a third will not survive.

That sounds like a failure. It is not. The two thirds that do survive have been checked by a human, which is more than anybody else's list has been.

Step four: find the person, not the portal

At a company of twenty people, the careers page is a form that goes into an inbox nobody has opened since March.

Work out who runs the team you would sit in.

> For each of these companies, who leads the team responsible for content and social? Give me the likely job title, and tell me where I would find that person.

Then go and find them yourself, on LinkedIn or on the company's own site, and message them. You are not asking for a job. You are asking one specific question about the work, and the sentence you wrote at the start is what makes that message make sense.

What you have at the end

About forty companies nobody is competing for. A named person at each one. And a sentence that explains why you are contacting them.

That is worth considerably more than a perfectly written application to a company with four hundred of them.

The whole thing takes an afternoon. And unlike a cover letter, it does not get worse the more people use it, because the list it produces is different for everyone.