jsync | Java Staffing Specialist

Interview Tip - Do Your Homework!

08/20/2004

by Dave Fecak

So you have an interview with Company X scheduled. You show up in your Sunday best with some newly printed resumes and the first interviewer comes to meet you. The first question – “What do you know about our company?” An awkward silence…and your prospects of being hired are now grim.

One of the biggest turn-offs to hiring managers and HR professionals is when a candidate comes in for an interview and doesn’t know about the company. That seems obvious but let’s go one step further – one of the biggest TURN-ONS for managers/HR is when a candidate knows a good deal about the company!!

It seems like common sense, but sometimes in the hustle and bustle of scheduling multiple interviews in succession with different companies, candidates get confused or simply don’t put in the time to do any research on their potential new employer. Not doing the research shows a lack of interest and can start your interview off on the wrong foot. Taking a job is similar to buying stock in a company – no serious investor would buy stock without knowing the business model, and no serious job seeker should go into an interview without at least some general knowledge of what the company does.

We at jsync do our best to make sure our candidates are prepared for the interview, by providing information that we have about the company as well as any specific inside information we can offer to help you land your next job. We also encourage our candidates to do some preparation on their own.

Here are some tips – some more obvious than others – on how to be better informed than other candidates for an interview. Keep in mind, anyone with a brain and a slow dial-up connection can find positive and negative information on almost any company, so keep the source of the information in mind when you are researching.

• Go to the company’s website (duh!), but really focus on what their message is. Read the press releases and news pieces, learn more about the history of the company, check out the executives and board members. Who are their partners, their customers, their competitors? Does it describe their corporate culture? Some companies even put benefits information on their websites.

• If the company is publicly held, you can access quite a bit of information about their SEC filings and the like at several different locations – Yahoo is one of the obvious choices here. Hoover’s provides a good deal of information on companies for free, and even more information if you are a subscriber. Smaller companies are a bit tougher to find on Hoovers.

• Another great site for information on Philadelphia area companies is The Philadelphia Business Journal Online This site has a search capability for the past few years, and several large AND small companies can be researched here. We at JSync use this site quite a bit and highly recommend it for job seekers to do their homework.

• Google them! Companies put information on their website that they WANT you to see – Google doesn’t discriminate.

• Ask around. There are only a few ‘degrees of separation’ for Java professionals in the Philly area – chances are you know someone who has info, or perhaps he/she knows someone who works/worked at the target company

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