Why Should You Find Out Company Details Before the Interview?

As a recruiter I strongly advice you to do it. Even if the company has a website too large for you to digest in a few hours. Try to select from it only main information that you can impress them with: company main activities, company values, location/s, achievements and awards during past years. Try to spend at least one hour reading about them, remember as much as you can, even write down some information that you consider important.

If you go there for a position in a specific field try to find out information about that field:

-          HR: find out about current company headcount and distribution across the country/globe, training programs, employee benefits, CSR campaigns, anything connected to HR and if they don’t ask you try to ask 1-2 questions connected to the field just to show them you care about their company, you tried to find out more and you want to know more;

-          Finance: remember some financial related information – company income, company financial issues, problems they have and maybe some solutions you see, read articles, show them you are interested;

-          Technical: find out about their Research & Development department, their divisions, technical details of their products and services;

Why is it important to know as much as you can about the company?

-          They are likely to ask and if you have no idea your application will look very bad – you have no idea what they do, you didn’t try to find out, you prove that you don’t really care about the company, so why should they care about hiring you?

-          If you know, you will convince them of your motivation – you want to work for their company, you know what they do, you really want this job and not another one in another company.

Where can you find out information about a company:

-          their website;

-          people on social networks who work for that company;

-          internet articles;

-          forums;

-          job fares where you can meet recruiters;

-          even the person scheduling you for the interview can direct you to a source of information about their company.

What not to do: don’t ask stupid questions at the interview just to show how much you read about the company. Ask real questions, ask for information that you can’t find and are really interested in. I had someone at the interview asking me about the company values. I was really annoyed since they are on our website and also displayed on the walls in the hall where the candidate waited before the interview.

Take care and good luck with the job applications.
Geo