How to Find the Information You Need
There are a number of ways and tools you can use to find the information you need. The first is obvious: Do you know someone at the company? If you don't know someone, you may be able to develop a contact. Perhaps a friend or relative of yours knows someone who works at the company and can put you in touch with that person. Take advantage of this to gain an inside perspective on the company.
You will need to find information on the company's competitors. There's a wealth of information at the library in journals, newspapers, and magazines. Focus on the stats; zero in on companies in the same ballpark as the one you're interviewing with, but also take a close look at the leaders in the field. A fact or two about them can come in handy in an interview.
One enterprising job seeker was able to develop a contact at the company she was researching simply by hanging out at a restaurant and pub that company employees frequented. She was able to gather useful information about the company's current employment needs and what it was like to work there.
Look for everything! Pretend that a professor or a supervisor has asked you to make a ten-minute presentation on the company, and learn as many facts as you can that would allow you to speak intelligently about the company for that amount of time. You need to know the types of products and/or services the company offers, the types of customers it most often deals with, the name and business of the parent company, and the names and businesses of any subsidiaries. You should try to learn about the company's rank in its industry, sales and profit trends, type of ownership, size, and anything else you deem important. You should make yourself familiar with the company's biggest competitors and the direction in which the industry, as a whole, is headed. If you don't know much of the industry jargon already, learn it. If you know the name of the person who is interviewing you, you can even get a little background information on him (not to the degree that you invade his privacy, but enough info to keep you talking). Pick up a trade paper, join online discussion groups, visit industry organization meetings, and peruse Web sites. Research time is time well spent.
Don't overlook the smaller companies. You may think that the number of opportunities for advancement will be greater at a large corporation, but if you choose an up-and-coming small company, advancement may come quicker than at a major organization.
Discover every resource you can that relates to the specific company you are applying to and its business in general. Read the company's Web site. Familiarize yourself with its catalog. Look into additional job openings it has posted to get an even better idea of the types of employees it is seeking. If you're not sure who their competitors are, try searching, “related:[Web site address]” in Google.
You can usually find a company's Web site by simply typing its name into a search engine like Google. You can find a company's address and phone number or a list of companies in a specific industry and location at
Even if you get a call one day and are asked to interview the following day, don't think you can sneak through the interviewer's door and do well without having taken at least an hour or so to acquaint yourself with the company and its business. One caveat: Though it may seem like a good idea to try to get a lot of this research work out of the way early on in the game, intensive company research should not be performed until you have secured a date and time for an interview. Otherwise, you may waste countless hours of your time researching companies that may never call you.
