Posted by Brian McCullough
Here’s a quick job search hack for ye. Clients ask all the time: “How do I figure out who’s hiring?” Especially when the job market is tight, people don’t want to waste their time chasing openings that don’t actually exist.
My first answer is always: check the want ads. Sounds dumb, I know, but if you do a regular scan of the want ads in the paper or online, that’s the rawest data available. Especially if you’re doing a local job search, check the want ads regularly to try to get a sense of a pattern: which companies or industries in your area are strong and in need of help.
But my job search hack is this:
The companies and the industries that are doing the hiring right now are the ones that are the healthiest right now… the ones that are growing or doing well, even in a bad economy. Where can you possibly find out which companies are doing well? Actually, that information is readily available.
Use the stock market to figure out which companies/industries are growing and thus, which are likely to be hiring.
Here’s what I mean. Pick a stock screener. Any stock screener will do.
Yahoo Finance. CNBC. CNNMoney. Any of them will work.
Now, what you want to set the screen for is companies that are growing right now. If a company is doing well, it’s probably expanding, and that means hiring.
So, don’t worry about the stock price or stock performance. Stock prices can go up and down for any number of reasons that might have nothing to do with the company’s performance. Apple just announced record profits for the quarter but the stock is in the toilet.
No, what you want to set your screen for is revenue growth. Set your time line for at least the last 6 months; setting it to a time line of one year or to show you year over year growth is even better.
You can even set the screener to select for given industries. If you want to get into healthcare, say, the screen can return the fastest growing healthcare companies over the last year.
The results of your screen will tell you which companies are growing the fastest, bringing in the most money, and most importantly, expanding. Hopefully, this also means they’re hiring. I just did a screen on the CNBC website to see companies with 100% or more year over year revenue growth and got a list of 684 companies across a number of industries.
Of course this method is not foolproof. Not every company you’ll return on your screen will be hiring, or hiring in your area or specialty. But this is a good way for getting a gauge of who’s healthy and who’s not – of seeing which industries are growing and which aren’t.
PS- What about non-publicly traded companies? Is there a place to find the fastest growing small companies? In fact, there is. Every year, Inc. Magazine publishes a list of the 5,000 fastest growing private companies in America. Here’s their most recent list. Notice that there are pull-down menus to select for industries or states. You can also see the top 100 growth companies by metro region here.
PPS- Also, Fortune Magazine has a famous yearly list of fast growing companies. Check that out here and here.
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