The more you can learn about a prospective employer before a job interview, the better. You’ll need to research their corporate culture, products and/or service, and even the interviewer himself.
In the past this meant a time-consuming day spending some time in a local library pouring over various directories and periodicals. Today this task is much easier to perform as you can use the Internet to quickly amass a sizeable dossier on a target firm’s total situation.
Let’s start with the target firm’s website. It may give you everything you need or it may be one of those brief image-projecting sites that features bold design but little information. Carefully study the site. One of the first places you want to visit is the “Press Release” page. This sub page is usually a goldmine of corporate information on a wide range of topics.
Here you find news on new product announcements, new corporate alliances and acquisitions, major personnel promotions and even problems. It’s important to memorize which information you get from the corporate site so you can attribute the information to the proper source if challenged on it’s origins.
As you scan through this information be especially careful to note any mention of negatives. Look for the words “consolidation” or “merge as they may signal problems. When you’ve learned all you can from their own site, it’s time to widen your search.
Go to Google.com and perform searches on your target firm’s corporate name. When you enter the name in the search box be sure to bracket the entire name between two sets of quotation marks. Such as:
“Acme United Medical Supply”
This will eliminate having to plough through thousands of listings for every site that includes the word Acme or United. By bracketing the name between the quotes you’ll get only those results that include the entire name.
You can perform searches on individual products or services and you can also perform a search on the interviewer’s name itself. I’ve also picked up some rather interesting alternative information by performing searches on their business phone numbers, on even on their street address.
If there’s any chance you’ll be offered a stock option, or if the firm has any kind of employee profit sharing program, you’ll want to take a long hard look at their stock history. I do this by entering the company name in Google in quotes of course. Or once you have the company's stock indicator, you can Google that also for even more information.
You can also use the Google alert which will send you emails with articles attached on any subject you choose including your target firm's name.
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