The best and easiest source of research on a company is the annual report, which is a comprehensive yet concise description of the company's products, sales, top personnel, future plans, and financial condition. Annual reports for publicly held companies are easily obtained from stock brokerage houses or from the company itself. If there is not enough time for an annual report to be mailed to you before an interview, arrange for a copy to be waiting for you in the reception area when you arrive for the interview. Then, arrive 10 to 15 minutes early to study the document.
Other sources of information about companies can be found in your public library. Numerous national, regional, and local directories are available that profile companies in varying degrees of detail. Usually the best thing to do is to throw yourself on the mercy of a friendly librarian.
If you have an interest in several companies in one particular industry, then a useful reference source is the trade journal for that industry. This journal will inform you of the latest developments in that industry, regularly describe the actions of some of the leading companies, list promotions and transfers, and itemize job openings. Again ask your librarian for help in locating the appropriate trade journal.
The dangers of not researching the company range from diluting the potential effectiveness of the interview to a quick and lethal disqualification. The potential effectiveness of the interview is hampered by the amount of time required for the interviewer to explain the company to you. This is nonproductive time, and it draws from the total time available to you to sell yourself to the interviewer and to help create or improve the desired rapport.
When the interviewer says, "Let me tell you about other company" what better response than, "No, let me tell you how much I know and then you can add what I have missed." Then you recite a series of facts and figures gleaned from the annual report and other pertinent sources.
You can be quickly disqualified from further consideration if your lack of research results in embarrassing ignorance. One of my associates relates the story of a young and naive engineer who interviewed with an engineering and construction company called M. W. Kellogg. When asked about the extent of his familiarity with M. W. Kellogg, the young engineer blissfully replied that all he knew was that they made breakfast cereals. Needless to say, that job hunter quickly received a brush-off rather than a job offer.
Therefore, before you interview with a company, it is in your best interest to know such things as the nature of the company's primary products or services, the annual sales volume compared with that of its major competitors, key plans for the future, the identity and background of the top corporate officers, and the profits (or losses) for the past year. (Negligible profits or losses of any land are a source of concerned questions for your interview.)
More important than researching the company is researching the interviewer. This step is taken by even fewer job hunters than those who research the company. Therefore, it can be a very power fill tool. The purpose of this research is to find information that presents an area of common interest for yon to exploit in the interview. Since nobody likes a stranger, anything you can learn in advance of the interview that later can make you less a stranger will be very valuable. Such information would be similarities in home towns, schools, hobbies, academic majors, friends, churches, vacation spots, and nationality of ancestors.
Any common interest or background that you can determine should be mentioned and discussed early in the natural flow of the subsequent interview. This commonalty not only will make you less a stranger, it will make you more memorable and mark you as trust worthy and capable. What could be a better testament to each other s character than if you and the interviewer are both of Hungarian ancestry, or are both avid bridge players, or just vacationed recently in Hawaii, or know good old George from the Benevolent Lodge of Perpetual Motion? Not only do these circumstances imply a mutual bond of interest and respect, they will give you something to talk about in the interview. Such easy conversation will aid you in the development of rapport and the creation of the all-important personal chemistry between the two of you that helps give the interviewer a good gut feel. Finding such common interests will help slant the interview in your favor.
For example, a headhunter friend of mine once warned me of the frustrations of trying to match up backgrounds with job specifications when in fact the real, though usually unrecognized, task was to match up personalities and interests. He described a lengthy search he made to find an engineer for a small research group that traveled often. Candidate after candidate, each with excellent technical qualifications, was rejected. Finally he discovered that, when traveling, the group of engineers loved to play tennis and were one player short of a fulsome. My headhunter friend went back through the files, dusted off one candidate whom he himself had rejected but who happened to play tennis, arranged an interview, and saw the candidate quickly hired. In retrospect, if he had known of the tennis interests of the supervisor and the others, my friend said he would have suggested that the previous candidates revitalize any prior tennis experience or volunteer that tennis lessons were scheduled to begin the following week.
