The Twelve-Line Company File: How to Research an Employer in Nine Minutes
A reusable twelve-field file you fill once per company. Nine minutes each, it kills applications you were going to lose anyway, and it writes half your covering message for you.
Most people research a company by reading the advert twice, applying, and then researching properly the night before a call. Which means they do the work only for the companies that were already going to speak to them.
Turn it around. Nine minutes before applying, in a fixed shape. Two things happen: you stop sending applications that were never going to be legal or plausible, and the file becomes the raw material for the message you send and the interview you eventually sit.
The twelve lines
One document per company. Do not improve the order; it runs from cheapest disqualifier to most expensive to discover.
- 1. Legal name and country of the entity. Not the brand. The entity that would sign you.
- 2. Can they pay someone in your country? Look for a named employer-of-record provider, a contractor policy, or staff already outside the headquarters country. If none of the three appears in three minutes, mark it unknown and move on.
- 3. Where their people actually are. Scan five staff profiles. If everyone sits within two time zones of head office, remote means remote-in-that-region.
- 4. Headcount band. Ten, one hundred, one thousand, five thousand. The same title is four different jobs across those bands.
- 5. What they sell, in one sentence you could say out loud. If you cannot write it, you cannot interview well.
- 6. Who pays them. Customers, advertisers, investors, government. This tells you what the company is anxious about.
- 7. The role's real function. Strip the title. What breaks in the business if nobody does this?
- 8. The hard gates in the advert. The two or three genuinely non-negotiable things. The rest is a wish list.
- 9. Overlap hours required. Written as a number, not as a feeling.
- 10. The named human. Hiring manager, team lead, or whoever does this job now.
- 11. Two specific facts that are not on the homepage. A product change, a market they just entered, a public post from someone on the team.
- 12. Your one honest sentence on why you would be useful there in month three. Not month one.
Why nine minutes and not thirty
Because you will do this thirty times, and a method you will not repeat is worse than a rough method you will. Lines 1 to 4 take about three minutes and disqualify a surprising number outright. Lines 5 to 10 take four. Lines 11 and 12 take two, and they are what stop your message sounding like everybody else's.
The first five files will take twenty minutes each. By the tenth you will be at nine. That is normal, and it is the whole reason for a fixed shape.
What the file is worth afterwards
Line 12 is your opening sentence. Lines 7 and 8 tell you which two bullets to reorder to the top for this application, reordering rather than rewriting. Line 11 is what you mention in the interview that makes the room sit up. Line 2 answers the question you would otherwise discover three weeks and two calls later.
Line 3 saves the most time over a year.
Where to get roles worth filing
This needs a supply of roles worth nine minutes. Everything we give away with no payment involved is listed on Free For You, including the WhatsApp channel where roles are checked before they go up.
If the honest problem is that you do not have the hours to do this thirty times, that is a real answer rather than a failure. Our done-for-you job application service exists because aim is a research problem measured in hours, not a knowledge problem.