Twenty Companies That Can Legally Pay You: Building the File
Job boards are a queue everyone stands in. A company file is a list only you have, and it takes about ten hours to build once.
Scrolling job boards is standing in a queue. Everyone sees the same posting at the same time, and the ones open to your country are a small fraction of what you scroll past.
The alternative is boring and it works: build a file of companies that can actually employ someone where you live, and check them on a schedule.
The three kinds of employer
Type one can employ across borders directly, usually through an arrangement built for it. They hire globally as a matter of routine and their adverts say so.
Type two takes contractors. You invoice, you handle your own tax, and the advert usually says “contract” or “contractor” somewhere.
Type three can only hire where it has a legal entity. However good you are, it cannot pay you.
The whole exercise is separating one and two from three, once, so you never spend another hour on the third kind.
How to build it
Three tiers of ten, or twenty if you are being realistic about time.
Tier one: companies you would genuinely like to work for, in your function. Tier two: companies in the same sector you had not thought about — usually smaller, usually less contested. Tier three: companies that hire your function routinely even if the brand means nothing to you.
For each one, answer four questions and write them down:
- Do they currently employ anyone in your country or region? Their own people page and professional networks answer this faster than guessing.
- Have they posted a remote role open to your region in the last year?
- Where do they post — their own careers page, a specific board, or through people?
- Who runs your function there?
Then check it on a fixed day
One hour, one day a week, all twenty careers pages. That is the whole ongoing cost.
You will see roles before they reach the aggregators, sometimes by days. You will also notice patterns nobody else does: a company that posted three roles in your function this quarter is expanding, whatever its press releases say.
What it costs, honestly
Ten to fifteen hours to build properly. It is research, not knowledge, and it decays — a file left untouched for a quarter is half wrong.
That is a real cost and worth naming, because the alternative also costs time, spread thinly across months of scrolling, and produces a queue position rather than a list.
If the hours are the thing you do not have, that is a different problem with a different answer — some people are better off having the sourcing done for them than doing it badly at midnight. Either way, the free Remote Jobs (Global+) channel carries verified global roles open to applicants from Africa while you build.