Search Strategies Part 2: Targeting

2026 Updates:

Our website has great resources to get you started on targeting! Also, AI is a great tool for this. Handshake is where you'll find listings - but don't limit yourself to targeting organizations that post jobs. Most of the places you're interested in will not be on Handshake!

Also, check out our weekly newsletter, which offers tailored listings that are shared with us by our alumni and employer network, or that we know would be a good fit for our students. You can subscribe on our homepage!

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In this episode, Amy and Susan detail how to create, track, and share your target list. 

Transcript

[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.]
Hello everyone. This is Amber Brown and Ahmar Ursani.

We are both GPSI career coaches, and we're here to provide a few updates and a refresh on our existing podcast series.

So some of our episodes use our old community name, but we want to clarify that our new community name is Government Policy and Social Impact.

Or you can just say GPSI, see for short.

We want to highlight our updated career engagement model as well in this episode because it helps us contextualize the work we do.

So I'm going to give you a brief overview of the stages, and you can see more in the show notes.

So it starts with understanding yourself, which is super important for reflection and visioning possibilities,

preparing to the actual search and apply process.

And then finally when you're actually engaging in your opportunity.

So you may also hear in some of our older podcast episodes, a reference to what's called a live chat.

And we wanted to make sure you noted that it's no longer in existence, but instead we have a different resource,

which we have various in-person drop in hours that we had that are GPS specific throughout the week.

And there was also a time that you can meet our career peers. Um, available Monday through Friday for on demand support.

Additionally, we no longer use canvas. All the resources have migrated to our GPS website.

A link again will be provided in the show notes. And our last technology update is we want to discuss Career link.

It's now handshake. So in handshake it's our one stop shop for career related events job and um, job and internship postings.

You can schedule your appointments there and more. And to close, we want to state that our annual Career expo now has a GPS specific focus day,

where employers from our industry come to you to discuss career options.

This, along with our annual Changemaker Summit, which brings local nonprofits to campus, helps you see how you can make an impact on our world.

So thank you so much for listening to this. If you have any additional questions, feel free to reach out to anyone on our team.

Hope you're having a good day. See you. Yeah. Thank you.

Welcome everyone. This is the GPP podcast for budding politicos, policy wonks and advocates.

I'm Amy Heath Carpentier,

and I'm Susan Craig as career counselors in Washington University's Career Center and co-directors of the Government and Policy Work Group.

We walk alongside burgeoning policy wonks, politicos and change agents as they chart their paths to change the world.

This podcast is for you if you're interested in hearing tips and techniques that will position you to find your place in the fast moving,

mission driven world of politics, policy and advocacy.

In the previous episode, we introduced you to a strategy for searching for internships and jobs.

If you haven't listened to that one yet, I recommend doing so. This episode will make more sense if you do.

We talked about targeting, networking and using listings to identify opportunities,

and today we're going to dive deep into the first step targeting and give you tips on how to do so.

So let's start at the beginning. Why do we target? Often, students start their search over winter break by looking at career link,

or maybe going to a career fair in the spring and they end up wondering, where are the organizations I'm interested in?

Why are there so many engineering firms? What about me? Right.

Truth is, this isn't about Washu or you.

Most of the organizations in government, policy, advocacy, and nonprofit don't recruit like engineering firms or businesses.

They recruit either way in advance because they need to put you through their clearance process, or they recruit real time.

They just don't have time to come to colleges to recruit. They don't have the resources or the bandwidth,

and that's probably not where they're going to put what resources they have, often because they don't need to do so.

They get plenty of great applicants that come right to them. Yeah.

So there is no one stop shop, no magic list that's going to tell you where you can get an internship.

There's just no easy way to do it. You've got to put in the work, but this process is going to help you get there.

So the first step target list. What is targeting.

It's simply identifying organizations or even just job titles or functions that interest you.

And perhaps the most important piece is putting it down somewhere.

So it's not just floating in your head. There's no one way this should look.

It's not like a cover letter or resume, where there's a bit of a template that you can adhere to.

A target list is just a reflection of those organizations and in some cases, job titles that you find interesting.

Doesn't have to look a certain way, but it does need to exist in some form useful to you so you can continue to expand it,

and you can use it to organize and budget your time and track what you've done.

It transforms your search from being reactive, meaning reacting to whatever internships or jobs you see.

Open up to being proactive, keeping on top of the jobs, knowing who to network with and seeing postings before they hit job or internship sites.

So the other thing that it does is it having a target list, helps to reduce anxiety and tension.

If you try to hold all of the tasks, organizations, people in your brain,

it really increases the cognitive load that you donate to your search or that you know there's plenty of that already.

In this process, we already have enough.

So having a place where you can put all of your info reduces the cognitive load and the anxiety because it lets your your brain lets go of that.

Logistically, most students will use something like a Google Drive or a Google Doc, um, Google Sheets to organize their list of organizations.

But I've also seen students use like a bullet journal style tracker where they're using a physical notebook, an app like Evernote, whatever.

What doesn't work are open tabs on your computer because my computer will sometimes randomly shut down.

And then there go the tabs. So that's not really an effective way to organize the target list.

Plus you can't share it with anybody. Right. And that's a really,

I think big advantage to having a target list is that it gives you this opportunity to show it to people who you talk to and get their feedback on it.

I think that's one of the best questions you can ask someone with whom you're networking is to say, hey, can you look at my target list?

And then they can give you some feedback on organizations that you might be missing or some insights into hiring timelines.

Or they might say, oh, I know somebody over there.

It's just a really quick and easy way to get some feedback, and it really helps them understand what you're thinking about.

Okay, so now that we've established that you need to have a list, not a bunch of tabs,

you might be thinking, great, but I don't know what to put on it.

Where should I start? True enough. Yeah. So that's a good question. Um, so the first thing to do is just start with your own experiences.

What issues or activities really energize you?

What classes have intrigued you? What issues do you follow in the news?

What do you care about? Oftentimes, students are engaging in philanthropy or following someone on Twitter or reading books

about things without really thinking about how they could pursue that work in the field.

So just start there.

You might be surprised by how easy building the list is once you put your experiences into this more like career oriented framework.

It's just an extension, right? It's an extension of your interest into the world of work, taking it outside of the Washu bubble.

Yeah. And, Amy, why don't you talk about the parking lot? Sure.

So I also recommend that you create a parking lot.

So you may not always want to go to that Google doc or that, you know, add something right away to your list, right.

Because that should be kind of a a bit of an ending place for places you have decided or important.

So you might want to have a parking lot, a some kind of resource for people,

places, ideas that you want to assess before you add them to your target list.

So if you're listening to a podcast while making dinner and they mention somebody or some organization you haven't heard of before,

you can quickly add it to the notes app in your phone. Or you can scribble it down on a little notebook that you walk around with all the time.

Something that you can always have with you is important. And also think about where you have it with you.

So I'm in the car during normal time, more than I should be.

So having something that I can quickly make a note physically on rather than having to type into a phone is really important.

This might lead you to new ideas. Having that parking lot, maybe, you know, maybe you just get a few ideas, but it helps you move forward.

What do you like? What is a good size list? So ideally you want to have more than three things on your list, right?

Sometimes students come in and they're like, okay, I applied to these five places and I'm like, all right, we need to we need to up that a little bit.

There's no magic number though, but you should have enough that you have options and it should go with you over the years.

So there should be some aspirational things on there. It can be what you don't want.

Is it for for it to be so big?

It's unwieldy and intimidating, like it's not a target list if you have 50 things on it, because that's not prioritizing or targeting.

It's also not a target list if you have, like the white House and the Hill. Exactly.

That's like a little too aspirational and broad. Really broad.

So like if you're going to target the Hill, you need to target specific lawmakers, right?

Like if you're going to target, um, a city government, you need to target specific, you know, departments within that.

Right? So that's more more targeting. And you might start with around five and that's fine.

That's fine. And then you want to expand the list.

And there are a number of ways to do that.

So one is that, you know in the canvas website we have spent considerable amount of time putting resources in there to help you target,

because we find targeting to be one of the most important things you can do for the search.

So you can look up things on ad policy, political consulting, NGOs, think tanks, and you can start to do that work.

Yeah, we've got a wealth of resources there. I feel like, um, it's underutilized, but there's so much to work from.

So check it out. And then I would say the next place to look is LinkedIn.

You can search for the organization that you're interested in.

Um, you can look at their employees and see where else have they worked before they worked at this, uh, you know, aspirational organization.

There's also a column on the right hand side.

If you're looking at organizations that would say, these are if you like this organization, here are some similar ones.

So for instance, if you type in Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, the center for Reproductive Rights,

the Human Rights Campaign, those will all appear on the side. And you know, well, you've already got three more organizations to add to your list.

And one thing to remember about that is that LinkedIn is not sensitive to politics, so you'll have to look into those organizations.

I did a search a couple of years ago on immigration and found that when you go

down that rabbit hole with LinkedIn organizations from many sides of that debate.

Yeah. So just be aware of that. But that is also a good way.

I mean, I know a lot of students are kind of hesitant to you.

They kind of think you're stalking people or they're reluctant to connect to people, and you don't have to be doing any of that.

In doing this research, you're still just you're not making connections. You're just doing a lot of digging, which is very helpful.

And it's still not. It's maybe like a little less intimidating to folks.

Yeah. And it's active job searching. But it's reconnaissance, right?

Yeah. It's not, you know, which is great. Right. Easy, easy.

So lastly, you want to talk to people. Students on Washu campuses are spending their summers doing amazing things.

And I remember, um, and having, you know, every several times we've had think tankers come in and talk to us about their jobs.

And they always, you know, they bring up Tom Finn and brought up, you know,

lateral networking network with the juniors and seniors who've landed great internships in the past.

Ask them to tell you about it. I can't tell you how many times I've done a LinkedIn search with a student during an advising session,

only to turn up a fellow student they sit next to in physical class.

Oh my gosh, to me all the time too.

Or they know I'm through a club or it's so big from their sorority and they didn't even know they interned at the place they want to.

Internet, right? You all are amazing. And you'll you know you're flattered when someone asks you, so go there first.

Share it with us during a GPP session or during my Amy quick advising hours.

Show it to your professors.

Having a concrete list that you can hand to someone really helps jog their memory, you know, and it helps them to to be more helpful to you.

It's also not a bad way to direct those overeager family and friends who want to help you, but inevitably give you bad or hyper intimidating leads.

Manage up. Give them a list of the top ten and say, if you happen to know anyone here, this is what I'm looking for.

It shows that you're ahead of it, that you're being proactive,

which is ultimately what they're looking for as you're someone who has a stake in your game,

and also it gives them and directs them to how to be most helpful to you.

Perhaps the most important advice we can give exactly how to manage your family and friends.

So in our next episode, we'll talk about networking more in depth.

But if you take our advice and begin networking with your peers as you're seeking to build a target list, the next step will not seem very daunting.

Until then, keep working to imprint your world.