100 Job Strategies
100 Job Strategies · 4 of 100
You cannot get hired by them. So get hired by the people they already pay.
In short
Companies that are hard to join directly are usually surrounded by agencies, suppliers and contractors who are far easier to join. Working for one of those puts you inside the target company's meetings, on their systems and in front of their staff — as a colleague rather than an applicant. Internal referrals and direct offers follow from proximity that no application can buy.
There is a company you want to work for. Their careers page gets thousands of applications. You have applied twice and heard nothing both times.
Meanwhile, three desks away from the manager you are trying to reach, someone from an external agency is sitting in their weekly planning meeting. They have a laptop, a badge, and an opinion the team listens to.
That person did not out-compete you for a job at the target company. They got a job somewhere much easier to get into — and the work brought them inside.
Large and desirable companies do not do everything themselves. They hire agencies for design, media, recruitment and engineering. They buy from suppliers. They bring in contractors and consultancies for projects their own headcount cannot absorb. Every one of those partners employs people who spend their working week embedded with the client.
Those partner firms are dramatically easier to join. They hire more often, they screen less severely, they care more about billable capability than pedigree, and hardly anyone targets them deliberately because the brand on the door is not the brand people want.
Once inside, three things happen that an outside candidate can never manufacture. You become a known quantity — people watch you work for months rather than judging a 45-minute interview. You learn the company's actual systems, vocabulary and politics, which makes you a low-risk hire. And you build relationships with the exact managers who would be doing the hiring, so when a role opens you hear about it before it is posted and someone inside is willing to vouch.
Companies also hire from their vendors constantly, because it is the cheapest possible hire: zero onboarding risk, proven performance, no agency fee beyond whatever conversion clause exists in the contract.
Look for case studies on agency websites naming the client, press releases about partnerships, procurement and tender records, and the logos on supplier landing pages. The target company's own blog often thanks partners by name.
People write "Agency X, working on the Northwind account" on their profiles constantly. Searching the target company's name plus words like agency, partner, consultant or contractor surfaces the whole ecosystem.
Apply normally, including to their graduate and trainee intakes. Agencies, consultancies and IT services firms hire freshers in volume, and their bar is whether you can learn to do billable work, not whether you look like a prestige hire.
This is the step that matters and almost nobody takes it. In interviews and once inside, say plainly that you find that client's sector interesting and would like to work on the account. Staffing managers are usually delighted to hear a preference.
Learn names. Show up prepared. Be the person from the agency who makes the client's life easier. Your reputation inside that building is the entire asset you are building here.
After six to twelve good months, conversion conversations tend to start themselves. If they do not, you now know the managers well enough to raise it directly — which is a very different conversation from applying cold.
The hardest companies to join are ringed by companies that are easy to join — and those companies send their people through the front door every morning.
Agency websites publish client case studies naming the brands they work with, and those are searchable. Beyond that: press releases announcing partnerships, public procurement and tender records for larger or government-adjacent organisations, conference sponsor lists, and staff profiles where people routinely name the account they work on. Searching the target company's name alongside words like agency, partner, consultancy or supplier surfaces most of the ecosystem within an hour.
Non-solicitation clauses are common in client-vendor agreements and usually either prohibit direct hiring for a defined period or require a conversion fee. They are a friction rather than a wall — clients hire from vendors regularly and simply pay or wait. What matters is knowing the terms early so your expectations are accurate, and not being surprised by a six-month cooling-off period after you have already mentally accepted an offer.
It would be if you took the job intending to leave immediately and coasted on the work. It is not if you do the job you were hired for well, for a reasonable period, and a client later makes you an offer. That is an ordinary and expected part of how the services industry works — agencies know it happens, price it into contracts, and often keep good relationships with people who move client-side, because those people become the ones buying their services.
Yes, and the same logic applies well beyond white-collar work. Facilities, catering, logistics, security, maintenance and staffing suppliers all place people inside client sites daily, and those companies hire far more readily than the brands they serve. Anywhere a desirable employer outsources a function, there is a supplier whose staff walk through that employer's doors every morning.
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