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Concept

LAMP List

A LAMP list is a ranked spreadsheet of about forty target employers, scored quickly by your motivation to work there and whether they are posting relevant jobs, so you know exactly where to spend your limited job-search hours.

Steve Dalton is a career coach who spent years with business-school students at Duke. He built the LAMP list for The 2-Hour Job Search. The letters stand for List, Alumni, Motivation and Posting. You list employers and note whether you have alumni or other contacts there. Then you rate how much you want to work there and check whether they're advertising roles like yours. Most job seekers treat the search as a stream: open a portal, apply to whatever appears, wait. Dalton argues the bottleneck isn't effort but aim. Without a target list, every new posting feels equally urgent. Your hours scatter across companies you barely care about, and some of them aren't hiring anyone like you. The scoring is deliberately rough, because speed matters more than precision. The list is a starting order, not a verdict, and you re-sort it as you learn.

A real-life example

Priya, a data analyst laid off in March, sent 60 applications through job boards in a month and heard back twice. One evening she built a LAMP list of 40 companies, ranging from dream employers to merely fine. Each got a quick interest score and a note on current openings. Sorting lifted a mid-sized logistics firm she'd overlooked to near the top. It scored high on interest, had two analyst postings and employed a former colleague. That week she messaged the colleague instead of applying cold to five more strangers.

How to use it

  1. 1Write down about forty employers in one sitting: dream companies, their competitors, places where friends work, names from the news and job ads. Don't filter yet.
  2. 2Add three quick columns: contacts there (yes/no), your interest, and whether they have relevant postings right now. Score each in seconds, without research.
  3. 3Sort by interest, then postings, then contacts, and work the top ten first. Re-score as conversations teach you more.