How to Get to Know a Company Better

You finally get a call for an interview. You prepare your answers to common interview questions for the accounting job or executive job that you are applying for, and you ready your best corporate attire. If you think that you have done enough, you’ll most likely flunk your interview for lack of studying. Do not miss one essential point of interview preparation: researching about the company. How will you excellently answer the following questions if you didn’t research about the company that you’re joining?

Why do you want to work in this company?

How did you find out about this job opening?

How can you contribute to the company and to your team?

While there are other variations to the three questions listed above, they all have one purpose: to test what you know, if you know, about the company that you want to be part of. If the interviewer sees that you have very little idea about the company, it will easily come off as an impression that you really aren’t interested in the position in the company; you just want to get a job and get paid.

And while that may be the very reason why you want to join a company, you still need to impress any interviewer by knowing enough about a company and showing it through your interview. Here are some tips:

• Check their LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn has evolved from being a place for professionals, to being a reflection of the corporate world. Companies and corporations have LinkedIn pages, so make sure you check out your target company’s. Check who the members are, and have a glimpse of the type of people who you will work with soon.
• Conduct a financial review. Not to check whether or not the company is doing well, but so that you can see where the money goes. A financial review may be all numbers, but the insights that you can get are highly valuable and helpful in your application. If, for instance, you see in their financial review that shows bulk of the money is spent in building a new branch in a new location, then you can easily say that they are starting to expand the company.
• Read past press releases. Press releases are created and published to announce big news. Check back on the company’s previous press releases to see what they had been prioritizing the past years and what the story of the company has been.
• Check the company from the client’s perspective. Its products and/or services largely define a company. Although you do not have to buy their products or avail of their services, you may check reviews and product descriptions at the least.