How to research a company before an interview

Most people research a company the night before the interview by reading the home page twice. That is enough to avoid embarrassment and not much more. An hour spent in the right order gives you something better: two or three specific things to say, a sense of what the job really is, and a few questions that show you looked.

Here is an order that works.

Start with what the company says about itself

Read the home page, the product or services pages and the careers page. You are looking for three things:

• What they sell and who buys it
• How they describe themselves in one sentence
• What they seem proud of right now

Write the one sentence down in their words. In the interview you will want to describe the company the way it describes itself.

Then read the job posting again, slowly

The posting is the best single source you have, because someone wrote it for this role. Mark every requirement and every responsibility. Then ask why each one is there. A posting that mentions "working with stakeholders across three countries" is telling you about the hardest part of the job.

If the posting names tools, teams or products, look each of them up on the company site. This is how you connect the role to the business.

Check the public record

A company's own site tells you what it wants you to know. The public record tells you the rest.

• The business register. In most countries you can see when the company was founded, who runs it and sometimes how large it is.
• News from the last twelve months. Funding, layoffs, a new product, a change of management. Anything recent is likely to come up.
• Public reviews from employees. Read several and look for patterns. One angry review means little. The same complaint five times means something.

Keep the link for everything you write down. If you cannot find where a fact came from, do not use it.

Keep facts and assumptions apart

This is the step most people skip, and it is the one that saves you in the room.

Make two lists. On the first, write what you found, each line with its source. On the second, write what you think it means. "They opened an office in Vienna in March" is a fact. "They are probably hiring for the Austrian market" is an assumption.

Facts you can state. Assumptions you can turn into questions: "I saw you opened in Vienna this year. Is this role connected to that?" A good question built on a real fact does more for you than any prepared speech.

Note the red flags too

If you find something worrying, write it down instead of looking away. A string of similar complaints, a role that has been advertised for many months, a company that changed its name twice. None of these has to be a reason to withdraw. They are reasons to ask a careful question and listen to the answer.

Turn it into three things

By the end you should have:

1. One sentence on what the company does, in its own terms
2. Two or three facts that connect your experience to what they are doing now
3. Three questions you actually want answered

That fits on half a page, and half a page is all you will remember in the interview anyway.

Where JobUncover fits

This is the work the company research in JobUncover does for you. It reads the company site and public pages, keeps a link for every fact, separates facts from assumptions and names the red flags. The same research feeds your cover letter and your interview preparation. It never contacts anyone at the company, and you can open every source yourself.