Job hunt framework — How to find the right company to work for? A step-by-step guide.

Today, in many professions the opportunities are countless, people are bagging multiple jobs, weighing them all, and selecting one. The game is no more about getting ‘a job’ it’s about getting ‘the job.’ The job that is the most suited among all other opportunities. Applying for a job is a tiring process and many people lose a lot of energy applying to companies that they don’t need to get in. If you are struggling to find out which company is right for you, the ‘Job hunt framework’ is here to help.

Step 1: List companies

List down all the companies that have an opening for a role you are interested in. Use LinkedIn, AngelList, and any similar platform to do filtered searches. Reach out to your friends and seniors to see if their companies have any openings. You can also track college placements in the country and see what companies are hiring for your role. How big the list should depend on how clear you are about the filters. For example: “I don’t want to work outside India”. “I don’t want to work in early startups”, etc. Try to get at least 20 companies on the list.

Step 2: List five job traits and rate them

We need to introspect calmly because it is the most critical part of the framework. List down the 5 things in the job that are most valuable to you? For example Team culture, Brand value, Interesting projects, Location, Pay, etc are some traits. Once the traits are listed, rate them out of 5 stars to mention how important are they to you. 5 stars means it is extremely important, you can’t compromise on this, 3 stars means it’s important but you can compromise and 1 star means it’s not a deal-breaker.

Some good practices

1. While rating the traits don’t give a single rating to all the traits like 3,3,3,3,3. Have variations like 5,4,3,4,5. You need to prioritize certain things over others.

2. If certain traits are 1 or 2 stars rated, remove or replace them with something that is 3 or 3+.

3. While listing traits, pick traits that you can research on or take an educated guess about. For example, in “interesting project”, you can speak with a hiring manager or read from the job description, what the project you will be working on is going to be.

Step 3: Score companies individually based on the traits

Once the sheet is set up, individually research each job opening. If your traits are “Team culture, Brand value, Interesting project, Location, Pay” then decide for job opening 1, how much do you rate the company's team culture, how much would you rate the brand value, and so on. Score the openings from a total of 10 points for each trait.

Some mathematics:

Instead of finding the sum for every company find the weighted sum, meaning multiply each score (out of 10) with the star rating of the trait, you get a weighted score. Add all the weighted scores to get the final weighted sum for the company.

For example:
If your traits are star-rated like this:
Trait 1 = 5 star
Trait 2 = 4 star
Trait 3 = 3 star

and your company score for the traits (out of 10) are like:
Company score for Trait 1 = 7
Company score for Trait 2 = 9
Company score for Trait 3 = 10

Then the weighted sum will be: (7x5) + (9x4) + (10x3) = 101

Step 4: Arrange the list in descending order of weighted sum

The hard part is done, the fun part is here. Arrange the list in descending order of weighted sum. Divide the list into tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3. I recommend keeping the top 10% in tier 1, the next 20% in tier 2, and the rest 70% in tier 3 but you can define the percentages that you feel are right.

Step 5: Make adjustments based on your gut feeling

So far we have tried to minimize the effect of gut feeling and tried to make decisions using a structured method but in the final step, we should look at all the tier 2 and tier 3 companies once again and see if anyone should be moved to tier 1. We are going to trust our feeling to make the final adjustment.

Step 6: Apply

The tier 1 list here is the final list of companies that you should target first. If we don’t get into these, I would encourage you to ask them for feedback and find out where you could improve. At this point, you have two options, apply for the tier 2 list or take some time off, upskill and apply for tier 1 companies again in 3/6/9 months (valid for junior roles).

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