A practical guide to researching organizations, opportunities, teams, and hiring decision-makers.

Applications go into systems. Opportunities come from people.

Find the People Behind the Jobs teaches emerging creatives how to look beyond a job posting and understand the people, teams, and organizational structure behind it. Readers learn how to turn a general application into a focused, informed job-search effort without trying to bypass the employer’s formal process.

The guide walks you through:

• Defining target roles, alternate job titles, departments, and organization types

• Reading a job posting as a research brief

• Using clues in a posting to identify the department and team behind a position

• Mapping an organization from company to division, department, team, and manager

• Identifying a likely hiring manager using current, relevant evidence

• Finding recruiters, team members, alumni, and other relationship bridges

• Using focused search strings and professional platforms more effectively

• Applying through the formal process before following up

• Writing a professional, relevant follow-up message

• Researching target organizations before positions are posted

• Building and maintaining a practical target tracker

• Completing a five-organization research challenge

Worksheets, search tools, examples, confidence checks, and organizational maps help readers move from guessing at who might be involved to building a small, evidence-based contact map for each opportunity.

Designed for recent graduates and emerging creatives who want to make their job searches more focused, informed, and human.

Digital PDF edition. The download link is delivered automatically after purchase.