•Is the company on the stock exchange, or is it private? Family-owned?
•Does the company do business locally or internationally?
•How long has the company been in business? Has it changed owners more than once?
•What other companies are its biggest competitors?
•Has the company grown in recent years, or is its industry suffering?
•What trends taking place in the world today might have an impact on the company’s business?
Articles About the Company. Search for articles about the company on the Internet, too. You will no doubt find dozens of online articles, or even hundreds if it’s a large company. If you find references to printed publications with articles, go to your library to look them up. There, you’ll find answers to questions such as:
•Has the company been in the news lately? If so, why? What are others saying and writing about the company?
•Where does the company as a whole place its focus?
•Has it merged or set up partnerships with any other companies?
•Has it introduced new products or services?
•Has it hired new executives?
•What charities has the company supported, and what do these charities say about the company’s character and values?
•Is the company actively involved with the charity or simply making contributions?
•What is the primary focus of the charities — humanitarian, environmental, local, international, educational, or other?
Articles By or Regarding Key People. Try another Internet search for articles by or about some of the company’s top executives. These will give you a good feeling for the company and what it’s all about. You may even find articles that reference a key individual before he or she joined the company. If this person could be your immediate boss or the head of your potential division, knowing this background will tell you a lot about the kind of people the company values. You might even be able to find direct quotes from some executives to give you an inside look into facts about this person and what kind of behaviors they like or dislike. No matter whether this person is likely to be your interviewer or not, by understanding more about a company’s execs, you will develop a more in-depth profile of the company and its important players.
Articles will also give you a good idea of the kind of experience the company is looking for. If you can find out the background of some of a company’s current employees, you might start to see patterns in the types of people the company likes to hire. This kind of probing is definitely worth your time. If you look long and hard enough, you might even find an article mentioning someone who holds or who held the very same position you want!
The LinkedIn Advantage
Social networking sites like LinkedIn.com are another great source of company information. You may even discover companies of interest that you didn’t know about. For example, LinkedIn hosts hundreds of
interest groups, and if you search for groups in your areas of interest, you should be able to find others in your targeted industry who are working for great companies.
You can search for specific companies, a city you’re interested in, or a particular industry. Make sure to search for old friends and classmates as well to find out where they’re working. You might end up with a direct connection at a great company that you didn’t even realize you had!
When you search for one of your targeted companies on LinkedIn, you’ll find lists of those companies’ employees who maintain LinkedIn profiles. Look for people working in the division you’re interested in, for example, and read their information. You will find out more than you ever thought possible. These profiles often even include testimonials, so you can get a sense of the kind of people the company tends to hire.
When you review the profiles, look for trends rather than just specifics about individuals. Does a particular company’s employees have things in common that could help you create a company profile? For example:
•Are the profiles similar in tone — such as all very buttoned-down or all quite casual?
•In what age group do the people listed tend to fall?
•How many years of experience or what level of education do most of the employees mention in their profiles?
•What is most often mentioned in the testimonials of the company’s employees? Do they tend to focus more on creative input … loyalty … integrity?
When you have a list of the company’s employees who have LinkedIn profiles, you will probably be amazed to discover how connected we all truly are to one another. Remember that old Kevin Bacon game that showed how everyone in Hollywood was only six degrees separated from him? LinkedIn works off that same idea — that everyone is only six degrees away from linking with everyone else. In other words, if you set up a profile on LinkedIn and invite others you know into your network, you will begin to create more and more connections. LinkedIn can search your address book in Microsoft Outlook or your e-mail list from many different servers and tell you automatically who on your list already has a profile on the site. You may even find out that you already know someone at one of your targeted companies! But even if you don’t, you may still be able to establish a connection with someone.
Here’s how it works. Let’s say someone in your network knows someone in one of your targeted companies, and you see the number “2” by the employee’s name on LinkedIn. This means that the employee you want to meet is only one connection away from you — someone in your own network knows that person directly. LinkedIn then allows you to ask that friend in your network to introduce you to the employee by sending an e-mail to that employee through the LinkedIn system — and you’re off to the races!
If you see a “3” next to the name of the person you want to meet, it means you’re two connections away from that person. So, you would need to request two introductions in order to meet him or her. That means you could ask the friend in your network to set up an introduction with the other person connected to the employee. Then, hopefully, that person would be willing to set up an introduction for you directly with the employee in question. That’s a fair amount of work, of course, so you’d want to make sure that the connection will really be beneficial to you.
If you’re only one connection away from an important company employee (a “2”), it should be easy enough to get an introduction, and it’s well worth the effort. So, don’t be shy about making these connections. If someone is unwilling to help you out with information about the company, that’s fine, but you may also meet a great ally who could even help you get a job that’s better than you had hoped for.
Culture is Key
As you sift through all of the information on LinkedIn (and elsewhere), see what it tells you about the company’s “culture.” Every company has a culture, and it’s usually driven by its top leaders. So, reading LinkedIn profiles of a company’s top executives can be really helpful, too, giving you a good sense of the company’s values based on how its leaders are presented.
As an applicant, fitting in with the company’s culture is key. First of all, if you don’t fit in, you’ll have a harder
