5 Tips for Researching an Employer Before an Interview

You have a big interview coming up and want to get yourself ready as best as you can, but as you reread the job description for the bajillionth time, you ask yourself: how can I possibly prepare any further?

We’ve all been there.

As someone who’s not just in HR but who was originally trained as a journalist, my gut instinct is to take a step back from the job description and look under every rock before coming back to it—here are 5 simple tips:

Tip 1: 5Ws

First things first, you’ll need to have some idea what questions you want to answer with your research, and a good start for research questions is often the 5Ws.

In journalism school, we learned how to dig into a story by asking: who, what, when, where, and why, but over my people career, this has continued to be a great starting point for any research and preparing for an interview is no different.

Some brainstorming questions to think about:

o   Who is the company, i.e. it’s values, mission, culture, employer brand?

o   What is its industry and market?

o   When did the organization get founded (or bought out)?

o   Where does it operate, i.e. is it local, national, or global?

o   Why would they be interested in you and your talents?

Tip 2: What does the company say about itself?

Now that you have some idea of the questions you’d like to answer with your research, I have always found the best starting point is to find out what the organization says about itself.

Check out the company’s social media (LinkedIn, X, Facebook, Instragram, etc.) for their blogs, vlogs, pics, and products, and then scour its website for its mission and vision statements, its history, what it says under the about us tab, and what the organization’s leaders have to say.

This will give you a sense of the employer’s brand, the kind of person who works there, the kinds of customers they have, and whether you’ll be a good fit the company’s culture—you’ll also find out whether the company’s culture is a good fit for you.

YouTube and the company’s website are often fantastic sources of video to get a sense of a company’s culture:

For a niche engineering firm I interviewed with, I watched a short sales video on YouTube given by the company’s marketing director about a laser technology product—the content was way over my head, but the video gave me so much information about the organization, its products, its clients, and the company culture that the marketing director herself expressed. (Incidentally, she ended up being one of the stakeholder department heads who interviewed me and the video she produced was a good talking point).

Tip 3: What do others say about the company?  

Using each of the sources mentioned above, you can then turn that same lens around to look at what others say about the company.

Social media comments in general need to be taken with a grain of salt, of course, but they start to give you a sense of how customers and even employees feel about an organization, and LinkedIn in particular may provide a rich source of content of what others say about the organization.

YouTube may also be a source of video content where customers or users discuss the organization or its product, and when interviewing for a hospital network, I actually found a very genuine testimonial from a soon to be retired nurse who had a great 20+ year career working there—it gave me a clear sense that the hospital and its affiliates had a very community-oriented culture.

Glassdoor and Indeed are then also a good source of ratings and reviews concerning the employer. It’s best to be judicious about the truthfulness and quality of negative comments about an organization online as I’ve seen many such comments spring from disgruntled former employees when I was confident my own organization acted in good faith—rather than taking each individual comment at face value, getting an overall picture may be more helpful, e.g. if they are literally all poor comments, what does that say about the organization? How the organization responds to criticism (or not) may also tell you something about its culture.

Tip 4: Dig Deeper into the Company

With a good sense of what the company says about itself and what others say about it, I like to dig a little deeper to see what else I can find about an organization.

A Google search, including the particular location of the company, can often provide some helpful insight—for the niche engineering firm I mentioned previously, I found in a local newspaper that they had only moved to their current location a few years before and the company’s CEO was quoted as saying the organization was growing and that it hoped to be able to provide a better working environment for its employees.

Similarly, a Google search before an interview at a life sciences company showed me that this global organization I was interviewing with had actually recently bought out a smaller, local, startup where I would actually be based—reading this, I assumed there might be some clashing of cultures as the employees adapted to the change. I was able to ask about the acquisition in my interview, and sure enough, one of HR’s main roles at this company was skillfully managing the employees’ “that’s the way we’ve always done it” attitude.

It's helpful to look at a company’s website and LinkedIn to see who works there, its leadership structure, who you will be reporting to and potentially working alongside—is your department one that has its own C-suite or other senior leaders that can shape the vision of your team (and provide positions you might want to rise to yourself), or is your department perhaps not a priority?

Depending on your organization’s size and type of business, they may publish their own

annual reports or financial data on their website; they may feature in industry reports searchable online, e.g. Statista; and if you can get access to them, business intelligence reports can also yield interesting information, e.g. Marketline (though it’s not free).

If you’re interviewing for a non-profit, you may be able to glean some further information by checking out the organization on data gathering sites like Guidestar or Charity Navigator, and likewise, if you’re interviewing for a job with the state or local government, they are required to publish publicly available annual reports.

Tip 5: Return to the Job Description

It’s only at this point, after I’ve exhausted all the research I can do about a company, that I return to the job description—if you’re anything like me, you will be reading that job description in a whole new light.

You should be able to draw links between everything you now know about the company and each duty they want you to perform as outlined in the job description—pull out your resume, too, and draw links between your talents and work history, and what the employer wants to see in a successful candidate.

Hopefully by now you will feel a greater sense of confidence and ownership over the process whereby you can prepare yourself to interview them as much as they’re interviewing you (remember, it’s a two-way street).

As the quote often attributed to Benjamin Franklin goes, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail,” but so too is the opposite true—by preparing well, you are preparing to succeed.

This is by no means an exhaustive or definitive guide, just a nudge in the right direction.

Good luck!