100 Job Strategies
100 Job Strategies · 17 of 100
Find the person doing an entire function alone. They are drowning, and they have budget anxiety rather than candidate anxiety.
In short
In thousands of companies a single person is the entire marketing, finance, HR or design function. They are permanently overloaded and have usually been told there is no headcount. Pitching relief rather than a role — often as a paid intern or part-time assistant first — converts because you are solving their problem instead of asking them to solve yours.
You look at a 200-person company's team page. Under Marketing there is one name.
That person runs the website, the email programme, the events, the social accounts, the agency relationship and the sales collateral. They have been asking for help for a year. Each time, they have been told to make the case for headcount in the next planning cycle.
They do not have a candidate problem. They have never had a candidate problem. They have a budget problem — and those are solved with completely different arguments.
A team of one is a structural situation with predictable consequences. The person is doing three jobs, the quality is slipping in ways they can see and their manager cannot, and they carry the anxiety of being a single point of failure for an entire function.
What they lack is not applicants. It is permission to spend money. Standard applications are useless to them — they cannot hire you, so your resume just deepens the frustration.
What changes the situation is arriving with an argument they can take upstairs. A defined scope, a defined cost, a defined outcome, ideally small enough to sit inside a budget they already control. Most managers have some discretionary or project spend that does not require a headcount request, and a paid internship or part-time role is usually approved through a far shorter path than a permanent hire.
That is the wedge. Three months of part-time help, priced modestly, solving the specific thing they are most behind on. Once you are working with them, the headcount conversation becomes much easier for them to win, because they can point at concrete output and say what happens if it stops.
These roles are also unusually good jobs. Being the second person in a function means real ownership, visible impact and fast growth — you are not a small cog in a large machine.
Team pages, professional-network searches filtered by company and function, and job postings that ask one role to do five things. Companies of 50–300 people are the richest hunting ground.
A neglected blog, a stale website, unsent campaigns, a hiring backlog. The visible gap is the thing they most want to hand over.
Do not ask whether they are hiring. Tell them what you would take off their plate, in what timeframe, for what price.
A paid internship or part-time assistant role for a defined project is something many managers can approve directly. A full salary requires a process they have already lost twice.
You are building the evidence they will use to argue for headcount. Make it visible and attributable.
After a few months, the conversation changes from "I need help" to "this is what help produced, and I want to keep it". That argument wins far more often.
They are not short of candidates. They are short of permission — so bring them an argument, not an application.
Team and about pages are the most direct source, since a function with a single listed name is visible immediately. Professional-network searches filtered by company and job function work well at scale. Job postings are another strong signal: an advertisement asking one person to own strategy, execution, analytics and vendor management is describing a team of one. Companies between roughly 50 and 300 employees are the richest territory, because they are large enough to need the function and small enough not to have staffed it properly.
Because the obstacle is approval, not willingness. A permanent hire usually requires a headcount request that goes through planning cycles and finance, which is precisely the process the overloaded person has already lost more than once. A modest paid internship or part-time role frequently sits within a manager's own budget and can be approved in days. You are not choosing it because it is better; you are choosing the approval path that is actually open — and it is the one most likely to become a full-time role once they have seen your work.
Accept it quickly and keep the relationship rather than arguing. Some companies genuinely have nothing available, and no amount of repositioning creates money that does not exist. What is worth doing is asking when their next planning cycle falls and whether it would be useful to talk again closer to it. Budgets change, and being the person they already know when money appears is a strong position that costs you nothing to hold.
Frequently it is among the better roles available at that career stage. You get genuine ownership rather than a narrow slice, your work is visible to senior people because the function is small, and you learn broadly rather than deeply in one specialism. The caution is workload: joining an overloaded function can mean inheriting the overload. Ask directly what changes once you arrive and whether anything is being dropped, rather than assuming your presence alone fixes the capacity problem.
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