Ramit Sethi explains how to research a company before interviewing, especially if you're early in your career. Skip salary obsessing and focus on peers, mentors, and culture. Check Glassdoor and PayScale, then message current or former employees for coffee chats to actually understand what working there feels like.
This question is on research. This is from Matt. Matt asks, what steps can you take during the interview process to gather some information about whether the work environment has interesting peers, committed mentors, and a generally healthy, innovative work environment? Particularly in early career jobs, these things seem to be much more important than whether your salary is high. But they're the hardest to judge. Is there a way to make it less than a roll of the dice? Great question, because he's right. I do believe that young people should be focusing more on making better decisions about their career rather than how much money am I making? When I graduated, I was shocked to find that some of my friends were like, taking these jobs that were frankly shitty for like $10,000 more. And I was like, $10,000 in the grand scheme of things, you know, you can make $10,000 in a month or in a day or, or in an hour. Why make a bad decision that you know is not a great company? They're going to have you being an Excel monkey just so you can make $10,000 more. Remember, these jobs were pretty high paying for most of my friends, so it just wasn't even that big of a deal. And most of them had no student debt anyway. I don't understand. So what was the question again? Oh yeah. What steps can you take during the interview process? So the answer to this question is research. I love it because it's a classic Craigslist penis effect situation where no one else does any research at all. So if you do just a marginal amount, you're way better than everyone else. How do you do that? There are a few ways to do it. The first is you can use sites like glassdoor.com, salary.com, payscale.com. not only do they have salary ratings, but they often have reviews from employees that are current and former. The second thing is you can simply like search it out, Google out like reviews. So if you want to work at Company X, Company X employees reviews, interviews, start looking at what people are saying about it. The best way, of course, after you do some of this basic online research, is to actually reach out to those people who have worked there in the past or worked there now. Say, hey, listen, I'd love to take you out to coffee. I'm thinking about working at this company, but these are my concerns. You know, I'm a recent college grad and I know it's important for me right now. I'd love to get your advice, buy you a cup of coffee, take 10, 15 minutes, I can come to you. People love talking to young people especially. So make sure you use that because young people are pretty like innocent. They don't have some angle. They're not trying to angle you and sell you their stupid ebook. Maybe I shouldn't say that considering I also sell an ebook but it's not a stupid one, I guarantee it. But they love young people because they're innocent and they love to kind of stay in touch, stay abreast of what young people are doing especially top people who would be asking this kind of question. So the short answer to your question is this is a great question. You should definitely be de risking in other words removing risk from this decision by doing the research and then make sure you just sit in front of your computer, shut off your computer, get out of your stupid room, talk to people who currently or formerly work there and you'll start to get a real sense of the lay of the land. Good question.
