How to use LinkedIn to find target companies and people of interest

Estimated read time: 5 minutes

What’s in this letter 📧

• A recent client success story 🏆

• Stupid interview question of the week 🤦🏼‍♂️

• How to use LinkedIn to find companies and people of interest 🌐

Before I start, let’s highlight a success story involving a recent client of mine, Benjamin.

I worked with Benjamin back in February of this year. He was facing the challenge of transforming a career with several twists and turns into a coherent narrative fit for technology sales positions.

Shortly after using my services, the interviews began to trickle in. Woot woot! Good luck with those interviews Benjamin! 🙌

Interview questions that make you 🤦🏼‍♂️

I had been job hunting for months when I finally landed an interview at a prestigious law firm. I was eager to impress, but things quickly took a turn for the worse.

The interview started out fine, with the usual questions about my experience and qualifications. However, things took a strange turn when the interviewer asked me a question that I could only describe as stupid.

"Tell me," he said, leaning forward in his chair, "If you were a type of tree, what kind of tree would you be?"

I was taken aback. I had never been asked such a ridiculous question in my life. Was this some sort of test? Was he trying to see how I would react under pressure? I couldn't be sure.

I couldn’t think of anything good so I said I’d be an Oak tree, because of how strong and sturdy they are.

As I walked out, I couldn't help but wonder what had just happened. How was my answer to that ridiculous question supposed to help them determine if I was a good candidate for the job?

I’m not sure either. Some companies go to extraordinary lengths to determine a candidate’s fit, and that doesn’t always pan out.

Want to share your stupid interview questions? Email [email protected].

How to use LinkedIn to find companies and people of interest

If you follow me on social media, you know I’m a big fan of LinkedIn. I love it for several reasons:

• It’s hands down the largest professional network and job search board in the world. It had over 800 million users last I checked (no other site comes close).

• It enables you to research prospective jobs, network, and apply all under one roof.

Today, I’m going show you to how to use LinkedIn to find new companies in your search radius that you might not normally come come across.

Step 1

In the LinkedIn search bar, type in the name of a company that you’d like to work for. In this example, I’m going to use Google.

Step 2

Click on Google’s LinkedIn Page. See the image below to see what this would look like.

Step 3

Notice a few interesting tidbits of information on their page. The first one is the number of employees they have, which as of this newsletter, are 328,201.

The second thing to do is scroll down until you see the ‘Pages people also viewed’ widget on the right hand side, which will show you a few other companies that are similar to Google.

Now in this case, you’re probably familiar with all of these companies, but if your target company is not as well known and you’d like to learn about similar companies, this widget will come in handy. All you need to do is click on the company name in the widget to view their page.

Step 4

If you scroll back up to the top of the page and click on the blurb containing the number of employees, you’ll arrive at the page shown in the screenshot below.

Why is this useful?

For finding people at the company you want to work for, with the goal of speaking to them and getting an idea of what the company is like. I’ve heard countless stories of people going to work for their dream companies only to later discover it was a total nightmare. By doing a little bit of preemptive research, you can prevent that from happening to you.

Some examples of information you might uncover by conducting an information interview:

• Hiring practices

• Culture

• What a typical day is like

• What some of the people are like (especially leadership)

Say you wanted to find and speak to software engineers working at Google, you’d simply click on the ‘All Filters’ button (indicated by the red arrow in the image above).

From there, you’d scroll down until you see the ‘Keywords’ box. Type in ‘Software Engineer’, then click ‘Show Results’. See image below.

You’ll then get a list of all the employees that currently work at Google (like the one in the image below) that are software engineers. This is incredibly useful if you’re a software engineer yourself and are looking for the same role at the company.

By clicking on the individual’s profile, you can even see their past roles and get an idea of what kind of experience and education they have. This is useful if you’re researching a specific position and want to learn about potential career paths to get there.

Step 5

From there, it’s a matter of making a list of people of interest and reaching out.

I personally prefer using a spreadsheet like Excel or Google Spreadsheets to track key information such as title, if/when contacted, response etc.

To ensure you’re successful with this approach, I’d recommend showing an interest in the other person - this will avoid coming off as entirely transactional.

This always works better than sending a cold message asking to pick their brain (most people are busy and may not have time for this).

How to show authenticity:

• Follow their profile

• Engage with their content

• Provide suggestions and tips of your own

About the Author

I’m James, Cofounder of Final Draft Resumes. I’ve been in the career consulting space for 13 years, and before that, I was a recruiter for AECOM.

I’ve helped thousands of job seekers, from industries like software engineering, IT, sales, marketing, manufacturing, and more generate job opportunities through well-written resumes that translate unique backgrounds into coherent narratives.

If you’re struggling with your resume for whatever reason, reach out - I just might be able to help!

If you’re more of a DIY person, then check out Resumatic, my free-to-try resume builder.