How to build a target company list

Why thirty to sixty

Below about thirty, the arithmetic stops working. Change is intermittent — any one company might go a year without a moment worth acting on — so a list of ten produces long silences that feel like failure and are actually just sample size.

Above about sixty, a different failure begins. You cannot hold sixty companies in your head with enough depth to say something intelligent about any of them, and depth is the entire currency of this approach. A list you cannot speak to is a spreadsheet, not a strategy.

Three layers

What to filter on

• Size band. The single best predictor of whether your experience reads as relevant. A CFO of a 200-person company and a CFO of a 20,000-person company do different jobs with the same title.
• Stage. Venture-backed growth, private equity ownership, family-held, public. Each has a different rhythm of hiring, a different definition of a good executive, and a different tolerance for outsiders.
• Geography, honestly assessed. Senior roles have largely returned to expecting presence. Decide what you will actually do rather than what you would like to be true, and filter accordingly.
• Whether you know anybody. Not a hard filter, but the strongest tiebreaker there is. Two equally attractive companies, one where you know a person — that is not a close call.

What not to filter on

Do not filter on whether they are currently hiring. That is the conventional search wearing a different hat, and it will collapse your list to whatever is advertised this week — which is the ground you were trying to leave.

Do not filter on brand prestige alone. A recognisable name buys you very little at senior level and often costs you scope.

Treat it as a living document

The list should change. Companies you learn more about move layers; a restructure makes one irrelevant; a conversation with a former colleague adds three you had not considered. A list that has not changed in six months is a list nobody is using.