The job search is tough.

Online job postings get flooded with thousands of resumes, most applicants do similar outreach, and people with referrals are still getting all of the interviews.

Before you know it, you’ve submitted hundreds of applications and have months of nothing to show for it. Trust me, I know, because I did the exact same thing for years.

So, in a world where almost everyone is doing the same thing with little success, where do you stand out?

You approach the process like a top salesperson would by building a business case around why a company should hire you.

I adapted this approach from my days as a 4-time top producing salesperson and ended up:

Connecting with 25 companies
Securing 7 job interviews
Getting 3 offers within 2 months

So, how do you build a strong business case?

Let’s get started with the materials you’ll need to be successful.

Step 0) The Right Tools for the Job

If you want to build a strong business case, you’re going to need:

An easy place to write down and format your research (below is the template I used if you’d like to make a copy)
A LinkedIn account that has your job experience fully updated (it’s the first place recruiters will look and where you’ll be doing your outreach)
Bonus: A LinkedIn Premium Account to get additional job insights and send direct messages (this is free for 30 days with a trial)

Grant Horvath - Business Case + Notes 1 (make a copy of this template)

Now that you have your materials ready, it’s time to dive on in.

Step 1) Do the RIGHT Company Research

Recruiters’ and Hiring Managers’ inboxes get hammered with the same messages EVERY SINGLE DAY.

Applicants give a quick blurb about their experience and ask to set up a meeting or interview.

The same thing happens in the sales world too.

Prospects (people you want to sell to) get bombarded with a bunch of information about the seller’s company and meeting requests with no real substance.

Where the top salespeople win (and where you’ll win in the job search) is getting a deep understanding of the company and where you can help them.

At the end of the day, most companies want one thing. Someone they can trust to get the job done and can do the job well.

So where do you start?

Below, is the list of key places to do research:

LinkedIn ‘Posts’ Tab

Go to the ‘Company’ profile that you want to reach out to and click the ‘Posts’ tab
Look at the last 5-10 Posts to see if any big news releases came out or any recent key promotions
Write these down in the ‘Company Research’ section of your business case

LinkedIn ‘People’ Tab

Go to the company’s profile and click the ‘People’ tab (next to the ‘Posts’ tab)
First see if you know anyone as a ‘1st Connection’ (someone you already know)
Then see if you know anyone as a ‘2nd Connection’ (great for intros from friends)
Next go into the ‘Search Bar’ just below the people tab
See if anyone is from where you’re from or went to the same school as you

Company Website

Check out the news section or the about section
Go to their ‘Mission or Vision Statement’ page
Find their ‘Core Values’ (recruiters always reference these)

The goal here is three-fold:

Your outreach to people is going to be much better if you actually know what’s going on with the company and what they care about
You get to see what a company cares about and whether or not they’re truly a good fit for you
This research will come in handy when you secure an interview or talk to someone in the role you’re interviewing for

Step 2) Understand the People You’re Connecting With

In sales, people that you want to sell to most at a company are your key personas.

For your job search, these ‘personas’ are usually:

The Recruiter (Persona focused on finding the right people)
The Hiring Manager (Persona that will be your boss and the person you want to sell)
Someone currently in the role you’re interviewing for (Persona you’ll want to lean on for advice)

These are the people you will ultimately end up presenting your business case to in your initial outreach and over the course of the interviewing process.

Your goal is to find as many points of connection as possible on LinkedIn, Company Websites and Social Media to these personas.

Here’s how:

Go to the company you want to reach out to’s ‘Company’ profile
Go to the ‘People’ tab and search ‘recruiter’ or ‘talent’ or ‘people’ in the search bar
Look for 1-2 recruiters that are hiring for your role

What’s cool is that with LinkedIn Premium, a lot of times you’ll actually be able to see the recruiter or hiring manager that posted the job which will save a ton of time.

If that’s not the case though, follow these three steps above to find the people you’re going to reach out to.

Once you’ve found your recruiter, who you think the hiring manager is, and few people doing your role:

Look on all of their LinkedIn profiles
Look at their last 5-10 posts to see what they care about (bonus points if you engage)
Send all of them a connection request without putting a note in
Soak in their entire profile including ‘Experience’, ‘About’, ‘Education’, etc. to see if you can find any way to connect with them on something other than work

As always, be sure to write everything down in the ‘People Research’ section because you’ll be taking some of these learnings and putting them in your LinkedIn DMs a few days from now.

Step 3) Know the Role You’re Looking At Back and Forth

This was by and far my favorite part of the job search process.

I call it ‘Skill Matching’ which is:

“Taking a job application, finding the requirements a company is looking for, and typing out how your experience matches each of those requirements.”

Doing this exercise is how you learn how to build your story which is the most important part of standing out.

Resumes tend to do a crappy job of telling a tale of how you got to where you are and why you’re the right fit for a company.

The whole reason why you’re building a business case is to tell key people a story on why they should buy your product (which is you in the job search).

Here’s an example of skill matching that I did for a job I ended up getting an offer for:

Key Responsibility 1: Provide strategic and tactical support as needed to advance opportunities from identification through successful partnership launch.

Skill Matching 1: At Company 1 and at Company 2 I’ve created over 60 different partner relationships from initial identification through launch including:

Working with Company 3 (Persona 1) to include Company 1 in their Mortgage and Real Estate Coaching package
Building an API integration with the longest standing Mortgage Lending CRM system (Company 4) where Company 1 was integrated into their client journey and yielded over 40% open rates in the first year
Creating the margin structure, partnership model, and onboarding process at Company 2 that yielded over 50 partnerships in the first year and accounted for over 75% of year one ARR ($150,000)

As you can see in the above example, I bulleted out all of my related experience in an easy to digest format that can:

Be sent to recruiters or hiring managers by email to secure a conversation
Easily be pulled from to tell different stories throughout the interview process
Be used for other business cases if you’re looking at similar roles

Alright, now that we have our company, people, and role research done. It’s time to put our business case to work for us!

Step 5) Starting Your Proactive Outreach

The beauty of all of the work you’ve put in up front is that you now have a well-formatted document to reference for your outreach.

I’m going to make this section as straightforward as possible with a bulleted list of how to put that research to work (and a few examples to help).

Go to your ‘People Description’ section of your business case file
Soak in all the information for each person (recruiter, hiring manager, person in the role)
Go to your LinkedIn and see who has already accepted your connection request
Click the ‘Message’ button if they’re a 1st connection (or if you have Linkedin Premium you can do it for 2nd or 3rd connections too)
For the Subject of the message put the role you’re applying for and something fun from your ‘People Research’ (example is ‘Account Executive Role + Go Gators’)
For the body it really depends on your persona, but here are a few examples
Send all of these messages out and wait 2-3 days
Once you get a hit from any of these personas you have a foot in the door
Use that conversation to drive other conversations (check out the example below)

This is a live sample of me using a conversation I had with someone already in a role at the company I was interested in and using it to start a conversation with the hiring manager.

What you’ll find is that with this type of outreach you’re drastically increasing your odds of getting an interview by doing a sales strategy called ‘multithreading’.

When you multithread in your job search, you’re taking one conversation with one person and turning it into multiple others.

Here are just a few examples of how I used multithreading to get interviews without ever submitting an application online:

Connected with a hiring manager on his love of sports. Had a few more messages shared around how we apply what we learned in sports to our careers. Then he proactively reached out to the recruiter to contact me.
Connected with someone in the role I wanted because I remembered seeing him speak at a conference I was at a few years ago. We connected over that company for a few messages. He referred me to the recruiter.
Connected with a recruiter because I immediately brought up a rival school of mine and that we Florida people have to stick together in Colorado. A few messages later I had an introductory interview.

The beauty of your business case is that you don’t even have to win on your first outreach messages.

You can send out new messages via email, text, or other social media platforms and continually pull from what you researched in your business case.

Then, when you secure your interview you can continually build on your document as your single source of truth for that company.

Let’s win this job search!

The Guide for How to Build a Business Case for Your Job Search

The Guide to Choosing Which Companies to Pick for Your Job Search

Why Sending Out Hundreds of Online Job Applications Doesn’t Work