By T.J. Ripley
If you’re looking for candidates in a particular area, you’ll want to look
at local source companies. People with the talent and experience you need
might be working in one of those companies and they could be thinking about
their next career moves. But how do you go about finding companies within
any given area?
You could use the local yellow pages or one of the Web-based phone book
services like
Big Yellow or the
GTE SuperPages. These sites are good for finding companies that
advertise a specific product or service locally. But they aren’t so useful
for finding small startup firms that have national or international
aspirations. If you’re looking for people with experience running an
e-commerce site, the yellow pages probably isn’t your best solution.
You might faithfully read the business section of the local paper to learn
about area firms, find profiles of company leaders and get the skinny on
their business dealings. Of course, you need to check the paper (or its Web
site) regularly to stay on top of things. If you’re not sure whether your
local paper is online, visit
Newspapers Online! or
NewsCentral for
links to local and regional papers.
Another way to find local businesses - in particular those with an online
presence - is through a site called
Companies Online. The site lists over 400,000 public and
private companies that are online. The database comes from Dun & Bradstreet
and each entry contains basic information about the firm, such as its
location (Web and postal addresses), its revenues, and the number of
employees employed there.
The site provides several options for searching for companies. If you know
all or part of a company’s name, you can enter that in the search field on
the site’s homepage. If you’re looking for a company in a particular
industry, you can drill down into a directory that organizes sites into
fourteen industry categories. For example, if you click the Computers &
Software category you gain access to subcategory listings that include
Computer Information Storage & Retrieval, Software Publishing, Computer
Maintenance & Repair and Computer Data Processing among others.
Of greater use, however, is the
Advanced Search page, allowing you to search for
companies based on location.
Just enter the city and state on the form and click the Submit button. You’
ll get a listing in alphabetical order of all the companies in that town
along with their headcount and sales figures. Click on the column headings
(employees or sales) to re-order the list by those criteria. You can click
on the company’s name to get more details about the company
For example, a search for companies in Portland, OR returned 3739 companies
and a search for firms in Portland, ME returned 529. Even a search on
Swanton, VT (a little town near the Canadian border) returned a list of five
Web sites. Imagine how many you’ll find in towns near you.
Unfortunately, we weren’t able to successfully conduct searches on certain
combinations of search criteria. That is, we couldn’t get a list of
companies in Portland, ME that employ between 100 and 499 people. Such
searches invariably resulted in timeout error messages. This may stem from
issues related to the site’s recent incorporation into the Lycos Network.
Despite this shortcoming, Companies Online provides an easy and useful way
to find local source companies. It’s a tool you’ll want to have on hand
wherever you’re located.
-- T.J. Ripley is a journalist and Web explorer who contributes to AIRS
research and writing.
About AIRS
AIRS teaches recruiters and high-growth companies to find passive candidates
hidden inside directories, databases, archives and the public Web servers of
over 400,000 companies and organizations on the Net. For more information
about our cutting edge training seminars, publications, or web applications
please go to
http://www.collegerecruiter.com/pages/airs.php
