As anyone who has searched for a job recently can attest, sending out resumes in response to published job ads has become a very frustrating and low-return strategy.

Not only are a healthy percentage of published openings not even real to begin with, but thanks to the rise of the internet, AI, and remote work, most knowledge-based professionals are now competing with talent all around the globe—and we no longer enjoy the protection of being a “local candidate” that we did in decades past.

So don’t get me wrong, people do still land offers from good-old-fashioned job applications on occasion, but counting on that as your primary lead generation strategy is a risky bet. Instead, I urge people to “think opportunistically” and realize that a good chunk of the hiring that takes place in the market is never competitively advertised. Roles are filled all the time by candidates who simply find themselves in the right place with a hiring manager at the right time, or where a company decides to create a new position from scratch to fit a talented individual’s capabilities.

The key to this strategy? It’s realizing that beyond the 20 to 30 household-name employers in town that everybody knows, there are literally hundreds of thousands of other businesses in any major city that are flying under the radar and are not nearly as saturated with resume submissions.

In Seattle alone, for example, there are approximately 290,000 employers (and this number is much higher if you include solopreneurs) that a proactive job hunter could target—and even accounting for people with very specialized career backgrounds, the amount of opportunity is still, well, staggering.

A few quick searches on LinkedIn, for example, reveal that in the Greater Seattle area there are:

  • 1,100+ companies doing AI-related work
  • 2,600 companies in the cloud computing space
  • 1,000 companies using a SaaS model
  • 700+ companies in the aerospace sector
  • 3,300+ nonprofit organizations

That’s just to name a few common sectors one could target.

So if your skills are a particularly good fit with companies working in one of these distinct spaces (or any other you might name), the fundamental question becomes: “How many of these companies know you exist, and if they don’t, what are you going to do to get on their radar?”

Not saying it’s easy, by any stretch, but the numbers above truly reveal the scope of opportunity out there when one ventures beyond the myopic world of job ads alone. In fact, I don’t think most job hunters have truly “begun to fight” if they haven’t done some deep-dive company research of this sort. Landing a job merely requires finding a company that has a specific problem you can solve, so the more relevant firms you can add to your outreach efforts, the better!