Create a LAMP List to Help Target Key Companies of Interest

Steve Dalton’s book The 2-Hour Job Search recommends creating a LAMP (List, Advocacy, Motivation, Posting) list to help you identify and target key employers. This can be a helpful activity to help you both expand and then narrow down your options. The main goal of creating such a list is to develop a prioritized list of at least forty employers. Yes, 40!

Steve Dalton’s book The 2-Hour Job Search recommends creating a LAMP (List, Advocacy, Motivation, Posting) list to help you identify and target key employers. This can be a helpful activity to help you both expand and then narrow down your options. The main goal of creating such a list is to develop a prioritized list of at least forty employers. Yes, 40!

Dalton strongly encourages people to think of at least forty employers because he feels it helps job seeker move past the “usual suspects” – those big-name employers that seem to attract all the attention but are often very difficult to break into. Nearly 2/3 of employees work at employers with fewer than 100 employees. These small organizations often fall off one’s radar, even though they shouldn’t!

You can approach your list-making in anyway; however, Dalton recommends focusing on four groups:
1. Dream employers – your ultimate wish list
2. Alumni/Affinity employers – companies where you have a contact/connection
3. Actively hiring employers – companies that often pop up in online job searches
4. Trending employers – employers you see popping up in the new or trending on Twitter

Once you have gone through these parameters, you will likely have your target list of 40 and the “L” part of LAMP is complete.

Moving onto “A” Advocacy part: from your list, you are going to cull your professional networks/contacts (LinkedIn can greatly help with this) and note if you have a contact or a potential advocate within each organization. The Advocacy column can be a simple “Yes” or “No” or you can list the names of your contacts. Think about fellow alumni from your alma mater, fellow NIH trainees, or professional associations to which you belong.

For the “M” Motivation part: you are going to rank your level of interest in each employer based on what you know about them right now. Use a scale of 0 (no interest) to 3 (high interest).

On to the last component of the LAMP list – “P” Posting. In this section, you are going to search each company using a job search stie like Indeed.com to see if they have any positions posted. The use of quotes can greatly help aid your search – “Company Name”.  Similarly assign a 0 to 3 ranking based on the number and quality of postings that you see listed.

Once your list is completely populated within Excel, you can now select and sort according to your rankings. This will help you visually get a sense of who your true top 5-10 employers are. Excel makes it easier to sort, but you can also use the PDF worksheet here - https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e1d009b4c50125c6759f939/t/5e88b9cc1249b6227915be66/1586018765043/LAMP+Template.pdf