build your target company hit list with claude

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All righty. Good morning. Good morning, everybody. When I mean everybody, I mean nobody yet. Happy Tuesday. We are back for week two of using Claude in your job search. Now, I have not had time to move our... move the project over but we're gonna we're gonna talk about claude today we're gonna be building your company hit list with claude so again if you are tuning in welcome please say hey we'd love to hear from you uh we are moving and grooving over on the community side of things if you have not checked out my newsletter i dropped it on substack um and uh it's a doozy just of all the things the community team has accomplished this last quarter i recommend checking it out so if you go to substat you can read it i think i also put it on my linkedin last week i'm so excited to be with you all today jeff what's going on michael it's good to see you it's good to see you all this morning hello hello we are on week two This Claude series again this Claude series only running for eight weeks if you did not catch the first live stream last week Please go check it out on the torque YouTube torque dev YouTube It is up there.

You can go check it out. It's kind of the basics of Claude I'm also going to kind of talk a little bit about the Using Claude today. Again, you can use any AI. I think that was a question last week from David. Do you have to use Claude? Do you not have to use Claude? I like Claude. We use Gemini internally at Ronstadt. But Claude is definitely my preferred choice. But again, if you are tuning in, welcome. Say hey. We'd love to hear from you. We'd love to hear from you. Before we get into things, if you are not part of the Torque Discord, definitely do so.

Let me pull up the banner. Torque.dev backslash Discord. Definitely get involved. We have a lot going on there. We have a great community. I say this all the time. I say this all the time. I truly think that we are building a community. where you don't have to go through your career or job search alone. One of the questions I get a lot is, hey, if I'm not on the job search, can I join the Discord? Can I join the platform? And absolutely. Right. You know, the platform side of things, it pushes you jobs. I think that's a cool feature. It pushes you jobs that you're fit for.

So even if you're casually looking or not even looking, you could get some pretty warm leads in your in your profile on the platform. But if you just want to hang out in the discord, I highly recommend doing that. Honestly, I just can't get in there as much as I would like. um but uh but it's a great time shout out to the folks that are here in the chat now they're super active in the discord i appreciate you all roxy and i just got off a call together so roxy it's good to see you uh yeah jason it's good to see you as well uh excited for today um again i'm going off of a script i hate going off of scripts but I want to be very intentional on how I do this series and kind of walk you guys through things um so uh so again join the torque.dev discord um uh if you want to know when I go live text me this is my number if you have any job search questions feel free to text me um but but definitely uh text live if you want to get updated when I when I go live with these things Um, also I do want to give a shot to seek coffee.

Uh, my boy Caleb, we're, we're going to hook the torque community up with a discount. I've been talking to him. Um, he just, he's coming out with an iced espresso can, so I can't wait to try that. But if you want to try some really good coffee, I'm drinking it right now. Definitely go check them out. What else we got? What are some other things? I think that's it. I think that's it. All right, so let's go and dive in today. We got some people in the chat this morning. So all right, first off, let's talk about Josh Triplett- let's talk about Claude real quick right and i'm not that smart some of the people that can probably attest at aka Roxy and Jason after working with me.

Josh Triplett- So it's taken me some time to understand Claude and I think one of the things I should have done on this. Josh Triplett- On this stream last week is create a new project and have all the have all of the.

um data in there so if you do not use projects um projects are in clutter a way to kind of keep all of your conversations and it keeps the memory of things right um you know now it's different than skills right so skills for example if i want to do my guidance counselor two-pointer newsletter i can create a skill to create a specific newsletter and how to write it a certain way i can upload a transcript this is what i do for a lot of my um uh newsletters i upload a transcript i've edited this skill on how i want the newsletter to be and

then i say hey claude can you uh take this transcript and make it into a guidance counselor that's a skip right think of a skill as something that you would get a person to do what i'm talking about with our what we're going to go through is projects right so projects again is to keep everything in one spot it remembers memory etc so i'm going to go ahead and create uh actually a new project for this live stream um claude i'm gonna call it claude series um so uh a eight week um uh virtual course all right so i created a project and I'm going

to go ahead and I'm going to start sharing my screen here.

Let's figure out how to share my screen. This and then window, then this. Hopefully this is correct. All right, sweet, so y'all can see it. All right, so last week to recap, and again, I don't have this here, but I'm actually gonna go through it real quick because I do want to have this memory as we continue to build this out. So I'm actually gonna refresh real quick. um on this so how can i help you today so again the first thing is a skills audit uh based here's uh so claude's got a lot of um memory on me. So I'm just going to say based on my experience and what you know about me, I want you to act as a career coach, right?

So we're going to do this. Let's let it load and it's going to pull stuff up, right? So this is a skills audit. This is what we talked about last week, right? And it's going to go through this stuff. The next thing I want to go over real quick and dump this in here. I want to go into values and priorities, right? And again, I had some DMS after the stream last week that That that basically I had a few people DM me from the stream last week like holy cow. This is really good I've used it and it really pulled up some good information from me.

So again like this stuff this stuff really really works So we're gonna load the chat here and go through this and um hopefully it won't take too long my internet is a little slow today the ongoing it tailored us an internet saga uh all right so here's here's here's kind of what it did all right so so it kind of has kind of gone through this i'm not going to walk through this i walked through this last week but what i'm trying to do is i'm trying to get the context of last week into this project so we can continue to build on this as we move forward, right?

So value two, all right? So value two, prompt two is values and priorities. Oops. All right, so let's go under values and priorities. This is great. Let's do this now. I wanna figure out what I actually want in my next role, right? Ask me five to seven questions. We're gonna run through these real quick. Again, this is for people who may have missed. I'm gonna fly through these. so we can get to actually this week's topic but again i want to be able to um you know uh be able to get this context so last twelve months was once more stretch you felt generally energized um love building the community from zero to one um and what's the moment you felt drained um i i i haven't really felt drained um so we're gonna do that all right so we're gonna go through these real quick um again i should have done these last week in a project but again i'm i'm i'm showing you real time fast forward three years guy works on respective um i'm gonna say um i built the largest engaged community of three million technologists all right we're doing that and again i'm kind of flying through these here um because we got to get to the actual prompts of today um let's see Largest engaged, blah, blah, okay.

All right, what do you need to be true about people you work with day to day? I need them to be passionate about uh people and community building again you you can work through this on yourself again one of the things i say time and time again use cloud use ai use gemini use whatever you're using as as really your guidance counselor right i think a lot of times in in your career i think a lot of people don't know what they don't know they haven't been asked these questions before and then they struggle on finding their next role right money and title honestly um uh what uh Shoot your money in title.

Honestly, what's the number so let's just say a hundred fifty K. That's what I said last week plus And then take a director Not worried about title just what I'm building that is the truth. I'm not I'm not big on titles I just want to build something from zero to one which is a focus of mine. I'm gonna come back to the chat Do you ever use co-work for this application? I have not messed with co-work a ton. I No, it is a good skill. Question five, logic lifestyle. No, really focusing on remote roles, et cetera. All right. So we're going to stop this just because it's going to take some time.

So let's get into today's. Let's get into today. So building your target hit list. All right. So generate company ideas. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to I'm going to say, OK, let's move on to another topic. I want to generate company ideas based on the target role. Right. Give me fifteen to twenty types of companies that should be targeting, including including company size, industry and value. Right. So again, I think, I think this is, this is a huge differentiator in our job search. I think a lot of people are like, I need to go just after SAS. Right. I think one of the things that I'm realizing talking to people, like there's, there's a lot of companies out there, um, that need to hire engineers, need to hire people with AI forward thinking that are not in the tech industry.

I think one of the things that's happening is that we're seeing a shift towards, I'm sure there's a lot of companies in the agricultural industry that needs a lot of modernization help with AI that while you may not be senior enough for a SaaS company with AI, you are more than qualified enough in an agricultural space to help move the needle, right? So here it is. Community is a product of the growth engine, community platform companies, tech talent marketplaces, developer media and content platforms, AI dev tools and infrastructure, tier two strong fit, right? And again, it's building this list for me, which I think is massive, right?

Again, one of the things about the job search, I go back to it again and again, you don't know what you don't know and using AI to get through this stuff is very, very real, right? So my prioritization advice, tiers one and two are where you should do zero to one energy, remote requirement, blah, blah, blah. Want me to turn this into a track targeted list or pressure test? So again, right, it asks you questions, right? Let's go through. So yeah, want me to turn this into a track targeted list? Yes, turn into a track... targeted list and pressure test your positioning for one specific category so i actually like i actually use this a lot the the pressure test because i think one things i've seen a lot of times in and with ai is that it send it sends you something but it may not always be the best answer And so what I've done, I know the ongoing joke is, you know, uh, Hey, Hey, AI make no mistakes or make it perfect.

One of the things I like to do is pressure testing, right? I use a lot of AI around our landing pages that we've created, right. For Phoenix, for, for North Carolina. And one of the things that I say is pressure test this is if I was a job seeker looking at this landing page. where are the gaps, where are the weaknesses, right? Again, I think one of the things as somebody who is very non-technical like myself, AI has given me the opportunity to basically go out and hire consultants for certain things, right? I want pressure tested a landing page. I want pressure tested for email templates.

I want pressure tested for job search stuff. Again, like using that word pressure test, I think is very, very valuable to your job search. All right. So reading. So again, it's creating a tracker spreadsheet for me, which is absolutely massive. And, you know, and it's going through this. So let's see what it does. Let's see what it does here. And again, for those of you tuning in, welcome. John, it's good to see you. Again, Chris, thanks for tuning in. David, it's great to see you as well. So again, it's turning to a track target list. It's pressure testing the position for one specific category. So let's see what it comes up with here.

All right, here we go. So the tracker's ready. Forty two companies across the four tiers with priority status. Right. So so this is crazy. This is crazy right here. Right. Again, I haven't done this. This is I haven't prepped. Right. This is the first time with me doing this. This is pretty incredible. Right. So what it did is it basically went out and found companies that I could be a fit for and it rated them one, two, three, four based off my background. right now i will tell you if i did the prompts into the project from last week into this week it probably would help but right now we don't have that information so it's kind of going off of the memory of me that i've used within claude so what it's done is it's taken forty two companies across four tiers with priority status drop down columns for warm intros how they'll value you here right so Right here.

So, so circle, right? The actual like a community product like discord, right? They sell community software. Your zero to one build story is the resume, right? Another one, school. I'm very well as well. I'm not aware of Bevy. Bevy is a community events platform. Your event ops maps directly to this. Estimated size, a hundred, two hundred people. Right. And it gives you breakdown. This is incredible. This is like this literally gives you like a warm lead. So if I was actively on the job search, I would literally go to all of these companies and I would start messaging people at the companies saying, saying hey i'm casually looking for a job don't know if you have anything open um you know let's let's say let's say i would go to bevy on linkedin I would go to Bevy for company profiles.

I would then go into the people who work at Bevy and I'd probably message people that are very senior in the marketing product space. Right. Because that's where kind of that's where kind of community lives. Right. So I would say, hey, guys, you know, I'm currently actively on the job search. You know, I currently, you know, head up community for community events platform and I do a ton of event operations. Right. Now, Brianna does a lot of that, but in the framing, if I was on the job search, I would do that, right? Does it give you links to them so you can manually verify the information?

It doesn't look like it, but I'm sure I can ask it because realistically, twenty five to forty probably isn't that accurate. Yeah. I mean, again, what do you mean by does it give you links to them? Give it links to the companies or the jobs? Again, these are just company leads here. Right? So the objection you'll hit, you're not technical enough to earn developer trust. And then it kind of goes into the objections I'm going to hit. Talent marketplace community isn't product community. Partially true, your counter is the mechanics transfer, even if the subject is an activation playbook, content flywheel, event ops, turn engagement to a pipeline, etc.

why community is not and why is community not dev rel this is a trap question don't claim dev rel you get exposed on technical depth which is true not technical at all position explicitly as a community and programs the person who built the ambassador program events engine content system and let's engineer so again literally right here it is not only Giving me a active leads list for companies to reach out to in the framing, I should position myself to those companies. It then is also giving me objections I'm probably going to hit based off the background that I've uploaded into AI, right? it gives you your actual positioning line right i build technologist communities from zero and i already know your users because i spent years helping them get uh hired uh jason it pulls the data from the internet i i don't i don't i don't know where it's it's the internet jason it's the internet honest verdict this category is winnable but it's a stretch tier again really good stuff here right really good stuff again so if i were you I would create a project.

I think in Gemini, they're called gems. I would create a project and then essentially go in and upload all your information from week one and then start using these prompts for week two. Just saying it may not be current info. These are not open jobs, Jason. These are companies that align with my background. There's a difference. These are not open jobs. These are just companies that would value my background. So, all right, let's all right. So we did this. This is great here. So I'm going to go in and just exit out of this right here. All right. So let's go into the next prompt here, which is prompt two.

All right. So let's so so let's do this. Right. So the next question is I'm researching. Let's just say I'm researching. I don't know. Let's just say I'm researching Bevy, right? Because I don't know Bevy. Bevy was on the list of community role target trackers. I'm researching Bevy as a potential, tell me what they do, who their customers are. So let's go here. I don't know Bevy, right? So before I message anybody at Bevy, based off the data that was sent to me, I want to do some research on that company, right? Because again, I think the DM is incredibly important. I want to be able to position myself in the DM to these people in about three to four sentences, right?

And so let's see what they say about Bevy. Let's let AI do AI and go from there. Let's see here. Again, I think the biggest value for using AI in your job search in your career is it tells you what you don't know, right? It gives you a ton of information. So if you see right here, it's searching Bevity Community Events Platform Company. bevy layoffs funding news bevy cmx employee reviews glass door all right here we go so bevy is an enterprise grade community events platform for building growing scaling global communities born out of the startup grind right so it gives me the background it gives me the culture and work environment here challenges they're likely facing this is where you need to eyes open this is where you need eyes open bevy has raised But its most recent valuation has it around three, twenty five million.

That's a Zerf era remote boom validation. There's been no announced around since. Why you might be fit. Honestly, the fit logic is strong. Their buyer is a community or field marketing leader in an enterprise, which means you are the ICP. You've run distribute activation by a lot. And then it goes into red flags here. Runaway. and revenue, no new funding since twenty twenty one, the layoff pattern. And it kind of gives you things to investigate before net read high fit elevated risk. This is a talk to two to three current recent employees before applying. So I'm going to ask this right again. Again, this is me reaching out to Bevy here.

I would say, OK, this is great info. If I were to craft a DM to someone at Bevy to tell them why I'm a fit for their company, what would I say? All right, here we go. So again, based off all this information, what I want to do is I want to get a really, really good, succinct DM that I could essentially cut, copy, and paste to people at bevy right so i would be messaging they're probably head of marketing head of product maybe even their ceo a lot of companies the community team sits and reports up to the ceo as a growth lever and engagement lever for the company so let's see let's see what it comes up here because one of the one of the things i have problems with is really kind of thinking what to say And that's where AI really comes in here.

So here's what it did. I love this. It did a peer-first soft pitch, direct pitch in CMX angle value first. So I think this is great here. So peer-first soft pitch. This is my recommendation. Hey, so-and-so, I run a company at Torque. Community at Torque where I built technologists, community from zero, activations, chapter style events, content engine, the whole thing. Bevy's been on my radar for a while since your product is basically my day job in software form. I saw the intros, AI acquisition. I'm curious where community itself sits with Bevy strategy right now. I'd love fifteen minutes. Like, I love this. I think this is a I think this is a great start DM.

Now, do I love this DM? Not necessarily, right? I think I'd want to punch it up a little bit. So what I would do is say, hey, I like the soft pitch, but let's punch it up and I'm getting a spam call and sell me a little more based off my background. What would you suggest? All right. So again, we're using AI to do a very very uh solid outreach dm to the folks at bevy based off their background and based off my background again i think that's where a lot of people miss out on with the dms is they just say hey i've done this and they don't tie it into what the company does again using ai could help with that so let's see what they say um and then uh we're gonna go um We have two more prompts we got to get to as well.

Again, not going to say on this. Here's what I changed. If you look at it here, I'm going to zoom in my screen a little bit. It's a little far out. It says, hey, I run community tour, built it from zero, chop style events. Basically, I saw intros. Not bad. It didn't do a lot. I think what I do is I do a probably punch up a little tighter. I get straight to the point. There's a tier of AI for this work, Claude. Honestly, listen, for me with writing, I don't see a huge difference in these. I think when it comes to writing, I think just allowing AI to give you ideas.

To be honest with you, if I were to message somebody at Devy, I probably would take some of this, but then I'd craft a little bit more on my own. And I think that's the important thing. again and for michael's thing does the tier of ai for this to work no i i think any of it can work i i truly think so when it comes to writing stuff i don't see a huge difference in models but what i would do is i would i i i would punch this up a little bit more i i would edit it in the dm and then use that moving forward what i use ai for especially in my work or if I were on the job search, I would use AI to get me eighty percent of the way there and then the rest of the twenty percent add either my personality or my data or how I want to frame the conversation.

I think where most people mess up is they just say, okay, this is great, and just paste and copy. Do I think this could get you some responses? I do, but I think there's some other things I could add to make it punchier. All right, so let's go to the next prompt. JD, job description, red flag detector. All right, so. Okay, so I'm gonna say, okay, next topic. Need your help. all right i need to go find a job description somewhere so give me a second i'm gonna go to i'm i'm just gonna say head of community i'm just gonna go to linkedin and find uh head of community jobs let's see here the head of community okay all right so this company porto out of i think austin has one all right so i'm i'm i'm gonna do this all right so this is this is just a random job description so this company is porto So port.io, they are building an open and flexible agentic SDLC platform for modern engineering organizations.

I don't know what that means, but we are going to look at this. All right, so this is going to do the red flag job description here. This is going to pressure test on how to be a good fit. Good JD to practice on. It's a textbook case of a title that's bigger than the job. Here's the skeptics read. Red flags buried in the post. Strategic and hands-on is doing a lot of work. The KPIs tell where the community sits. Bridges marketing product and community access with no stated reporting line. no mention of current state of the community, hyper growth language plus series C pressure, customer community versus developer community, questions to pressure testing.

I love this right here. I love this. What it just did is it took the job description, it pressure tested the job description, and then what it did is it came up with one, two, three, four, five, six, seven questions questions to ask in the job interview again i talk about this all the time there's absolutely zero zero excuse zero excuse to not come prepared with questions in the job in the job interview especially with ai right so what it did is it created questions right what did the jd tell you about culture um let me ask you this let me ask you this based on what you know about me is this a fit and where are the gaps because here's the deal So what I would say, the reason why I'm asking about the gaps, the gaps is incredibly important because you want to be able to address that head on early, right?

Either in the interview or DM conversation, right? So straight answer. It's about sixty seven percent fit on skills, but there are two gaps. One, where you generally match the job is written is your torque job with a different logo, build and grow community. You did zero to one event, blah, blah, blah. Gap one, the devs tool domain. And it's the big one. Port sells platform engineers. Your community was technologists, right? So gap two, the seniority bar. They're looking for ten plus years of leadership. They don't know my exact years. If I went through the prompts on week one in this project, they would have it, but we don't because your boy wasn't that smart.

Gap three, smaller but real to working model. Port is Israeli HQ. You want remote. This role might be remote eligible, but the hands-on community role with Tel Aviv exec team means your mornings belong in the afternoons. That's livable, but it's a lifestyle. I love this. I don't know if I'd be able to pull this just looking at this, right? Or just looking at the job description on LinkedIn, the verdict. So let me ask you this. If I were to interview, what gaps, areas should I be ready to address immediately based on my background? See what it says, right? Again, I'm using this to prep, right?

I'm using this to prep. And also you could use it to help write your job description or your resume, right? So what I could do, I'm not going to do it here because of time, but I could upload my job description into this conversation and be like, based off this job description and my resume, where are the gaps? What should I expound on? And then edit it myself, right? You've never worked in dev tools. Why should platform engineers listen to you? Tell me about the team you've managed. What were your community numbers? Your community was job seekers. Are users of the product? How does that translate?

How would you drive lead generation through community? Why are you leaving Torque? Why Port specifically? The logistics question. Again, this is great, great information. If I was interviewing at Port, I would be able to Step in tune by first round interview, being totally prepped on where they're going to address. I have questions ready for them. And if I uploaded my resume, I could cross-reference before I submitted my resume and be able to expound on things. So again, fantastic. Whoa, didn't recognize light mode. I'm light mode. I'm light mode. Give me all the blue light in my eyeballs. I am all light mode. All right, we're getting slowly wrapping up here.

Let me know if you have any questions. So next thing, build a tracker. I want to build a simple job tracker. um so let's do here the final thing here i want to build a simple job search tracker give me the exact columns i should have in my spreadsheet again one of the things i've talked about a lot of times i think a lot of people struggle with the job search because they don't have a formula a way to follow up with people um a really really good solid foundational thing so what i did is i just said hey Help me build a jobless tracker.

Yes, you can go out and purchase like, I think Hunter is one. I'm sure there's a lot of job search platforms out there. But again, and then it says, can I rebuild exactly what are your current targets? Yeah, so again, so can you create a Google Sheet so I can upload my own data? And so it's gonna go through and it's gonna build this for you. And again, this is the last prompt of this week. So let's see what it does here. Again, the building blocks of the job search is to have good processes and procedures, leverage AI to build that for you. So let's see here, let's see what it does.

We're holding, we're holding, we're holding. We're holding, here we go, building at ten, base-sixty-four encoded, buh-buh-buh, I don't know what that means. All right, here we go, here we go. He's not a dev, doesn't use the A-A-A. Okay, always allow. Let's see what it pops up here. All right, it's taking a moment. All right, come on. And then one of the things that I would do too, when it comes to the job search and using AI, I would also get it to set, and this is where we go into co-work and we can talk about co-work on another stream, but basically allow you to do, you set tasks So what, what you could get it to do is you could get it to be like, Hey, you go into coworking and be like, Hey, can you run at AM every day on.

any companies that I've interviewed with that I haven't had any interaction with in the last seven days. And then what it would do is you could upload this Google Sheet to that co-work, and then it pulls that, and then it sends you updates. Again, I think one of the things about the job search is staying on top of everything. This is taking absolutely forever. I don't know why it's taking absolutely forever. All right. So I don't know why it's taking forever. We will keep it running. But otherwise, that's this week. All right. So again, to recap, create a project, title it Chris's Job Search, Taylor's Job Search, Jason's Job Search, right?

Go through the prompts from the first week. right if you want to go to the torque youtube it's there go through those prompts Then go through this week's prompts, build out your target list. I think one of the most impactful things that if you can remember anything from this stream, it builds, AI can build a target hit list, right? So essentially, you got to look, again, Jason and I in our past streams have talked about this. Your job, like your job search is like you're in sales. You are the product and you are going to target lists. Get AI to pull targeted lists based off your background.

Message those. Pressure test the job descriptions. uh find your blockers or your weak spots be able to address them in the dms and then build a job search tracker that obviously has stalled out so i will uh post that um in the chat whenever it's done um so that that that is this week's uh episode right so again last week was uh using cloud to figure out what job you actually want And then this week was building your target company hit list with Claude. Next week, we're going to go over a live resume rewrite. So what we're going to do is we're going to take my resume and we're going to cross-reference it with job descriptions and we're going to build out a resume that as it relates to the job you're applying to.

So hopefully you enjoyed this episode. If somebody, if you think somebody in your network could benefit from this, please share this episode on your LinkedIn, on your X would mean a lot. Otherwise, oh, here we go. Here we go. It looks like it just created it. Here we go. All right. I'm going to share my screen real fast and then we'll wrap up. But I want to show you this. So what it did is it created a job search tracker here right so bevy port those are the two companies we talked about priority high medium researching any contacts you could put there last touch next steps fit notes red flags comp right and then what you can do we can talk about next week on using called Cowork to run scripts to basically say, hey, set up an automation with any job lead that hasn't gotten back to me in seven days so you can stay close to them.

So that's it. Appreciate y'all for tuning in today. Thank you. Have a great Tuesday. Have a great week. We'll see y'all back next Tuesday for week three. And we'll see you in the Torque Discord. Peace.