Nail the Interview: What Companies EXPECT You to Know (Research Hacks)

Hi, how to research a company before a job interview. I'm Natalie Fisher. Let's get started. So what you'll learn in this video: how to answer that question, what do you know about our company? What do you know about us? Why do you want to work here? Comes in many forms. The real reason why doing research on a company is important. The kind of research you want to be doing with examples. 3 resources to get the best answers you're looking So why do— what do you know about our company? Why do research on our company? A lot of people are confused about job interviews and how to prepare for them, specifically how to research a company and what to look for before you get to the job interview. In this video, I'll talk about 3 helpful things that will help you from going down a rabbit hole in terms of what information you should be looking for and why. Why research a company before the interview? This answer is not what you might think. What are you looking for anyway, and why would you do it? So the thing I want to stress the most is the reason why you research the company is for you. It's always for you. It's not to impress them. And with this mentality, you will come up with a lot more interesting answers, and you'll have fun doing this research. It won't be boring facts because you actually want to know this information. The reason why you want to know it is because it affects you. It affects your entire life coming up if you get the job with this company. You don't just want any job. You want to care about what they do as a company. You want to know the things that they like. You want to know how they treat their employees. You want to know if they're profitable. You want to know how the work that they do affects you. What can you specifically contribute to help? How can How can they help you in your career? How they're likely to do in their target market moving forward? Why they make certain business decisions? All this stuff is important, important to you and your future. So how do you conduct the research? Where do you look and what do you look for? The way that I normally see the question answered is in 2 ways. The book smarts way or the street smarts way. So let's look at an example of each, and you can let me know which one you think is more compelling. So we'll start with the book smarts answer. I know you were founded in 1976. You have these 5 customers, you can list them, and you have 117 employees. If you're going for the look how hard I studied answer, this would be perfect. You could even throw in how many locations they have, how many staff they have in each. Stuff like that. Now the street smarts answer is very different, as you'll see. I can see that you are a successful cloud-based communication software company. Your CEO really cares about everyone at the company, and the company has good leadership going for it. You have initiatives like the 3P and EVO programs that help staff with self-development and company improvement. Now let's take a look at what's going on here with this answer. You're talking about the fact that they're a successful company because in your research you can see that they have many big-name clients and you can see that they have been around for quite a while. You can see reviews on Glassdoor about their CEO and how maybe he has a 100% approval rating. You can see comments that people have made on there. You can find all this information online and we'll get to how to Look for it in a couple of slides. You can check out the initiatives that they might offer. They might list these in their job descriptions. They have 3P and EVO programs. So the fact that you're talking about the initiatives that they run in their company means that you've looked for things that resonate with you and why you might want to work there. So this answer is substantially different to the Booksmart answer which just gives you facts. The reason why these facts are not too compelling are because the people that work there know these facts and they get outdated really quickly, so they're not super interesting to the interviewers. The street smarts answer is a lot more fun to listen to, it's a lot more compelling, and it speaks volumes about you and what you're looking for and what you found. So where do you find this information? There's lots of places and techniques to find the quality of info you're looking for, and today we're going to talk about 3 resources. So the first one, I love this because you can find so much information by looking at what a CEO says in an interview. So you simply Google the company name, the CEO's name, with the word interview on the end. Just type that into Google. You can find out so much about what their company stands for by what the CEO will say in an interview. There are certain keywords that he'll use, he or she will use. You can bet that those keywords will come up somewhere in the company's communication and with the hiring managers. It's the company's language, so to speak, and you want to know what it is. The company website. No surprise that this is a great place to start. You can go through the pages and see what jumps out at you. Sometimes it can be boring looking through company websites, but But it tells you a lot. For example, their careers page is telling. I'm using X Matters as an example because that's where I work. But the company has testimonials of current employees. They have video testimonials. Some of their clients are also listed and you can read about what they do. So you can go through the website each page at a time and see what stands out and what you really like. What draws you to their company? Why do you really feel like you would be a good fit? Fit and you want to work there. You want to know that for you when you go in. LinkedIn. So LinkedIn is no surprise either, but there's so many more layers to LinkedIn that you might not know about. So the LinkedIn company page is the first one. You just type in the company page at the top of the search bar on the LinkedIn website, and their company page will likely have a bio and some information there. So that's the first thing you want to check out. Next, you want to check out people who work there currently or previously. You can tell a lot by the people that work there. They'll have a description of the company potentially in their bio. They'll talk about the company in their bio, talk about their role, what they do. You can check out how long they've been there, if they've moved from one role to another. This will tell you if the company kind of promotes within. You can tell by how many people have stayed. You can look through the list and see whether or not you get a good feel for the reviews that people have posted there. You can see a lot from real people and what they have to say in their profiles. And there you have it. Why do the research? Remember, for you. You're not trying to impress anyone but yourself. You want to be impressed by them so that you can go in eager to work there. What kind of research to do? You want to do street smarts research versus book smarts research. And the 3 resources for your research: Google— Google the company name, CEO name, and interview— and LinkedIn and the company website. Thank you so much for watching. That's the end of the video for this week. I am Natalie Fisher. Your Career Lifeguard, and you can come find me at nataliefisher.ca. Click the link below to download the step-by-step networking guide if you enjoyed the training today and you feel like you'd like some more information. In this guide, you'll find information on how to land interviews using networking, how to research the right people who can help you, how to bypass the HR process altogether, the exact scripts to use to reach out over email or LinkedIn, and even more great tips on how to interview like a pro back at nataliefisher.ca/blog. Check out more free downloads. Thanks so much. I will see you next week. Bye.