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Importance of Background Information When Preparing For an Interview

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Summary: While preparing for an interview, it is very important to have an in-depth knowledge of the company as well as the industry that you're planning to work for which will help you plan your future accordingly and demonstrate the same clearly during the interview.

Get ahead of your interview and do your due diligence to beat out other top candidates.

To interview a prospective employer, you need to be very well prepared-over-prepared, in fact-because if you do your homework as thoroughly as you should, you will show off only a small percentage of what you know during an interview. You should investigate three general areas before interviewing with a company for whom you think you would like to work.
 


Gathering Background on an Industry
 
The first step in preparing for an interview is to gather background information about the industry. This is especially valuable if you are attempting to switch from one industry to another. The best way to learn about an industry is to read the industry's trade magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Barrons, and the other major business publications regularly and over an extended period of time. While a minimum of several days is needed to prepare adequately for an interview, even better is to spend several months to a year watching an industry, if possible, before scheduling interviews. Months before job-hunting, you should start paying attention to industry trends and forecasts. Read the specialized trade magazines of various industries such as Ad Age, Publishers Weekly, Plastics, Packaging Digest, Iron Age, and Oil &Gas to gather even more in-depth knowledge.
 
As you gather data, try to learn the jargon. While you should never go into an interview and throw around jargon, especially if you've only recently learned it and it's not the industry you work in, knowing some keywords, phrases, and acronyms during a job interview has its advantages. For one thing, jargon lets you talk with the person interviewing you in a kind of shorthand. You can cover much more territory than you would if you didn't know the jargon. Jargon is also a way to show that you are interested enough to have done some homework, and, most important, that you have the capacity to master new subjects. A word of warning though, as one seasoned job hunter pointed out: "I only used jargon as much as I was comfortable with because I knew if someone called me on it, I was in trouble."
 
To make the most of an interview, you must familiarize yourself with the employer's products, markets, annual sales, management turnover rate, recent achievements, forecasts, projects, charitable affiliations, problems, and acquisitions and divestitures.
 
According to Janet Tweed, head of Tweed Gilbert, an executive search and outplacement firm, "A job candidate should take an annual report and a 10-K and devour them. It helps to know a lot about the competition, too. Know what the philosophy of the company is--that's often presented in the president's page of the annual report."
 
At the initial stages of gathering information about a company, it's also worthwhile to put in a call to your stockbroker or investment analyst. Pick his brain on the company and the industry in general; they typically watch trends, corporate aggressiveness, turnover, and profits. When you have exhausted your live contacts, dig elsewhere to see what you can find out about the company. Start with online resources. Look for general articles about the industry and specific articles about the company. You're in luck if someone has written a comprehensive profile of the company in the past two or three years.
 
Any major library or college business library will also have most of these publications.
 
Obviously, information is more widely available for companies that are publicly held than for privately held ones. In fact, you may have trouble learning very much about a privately held company. You can turn to more informal sources of information such as present and former employees if you have the contacts. But you also may have to go into the interview with a little less knowledge and ask questions of the person who interviews you.
 
Companies provide many clues about themselves and their corporate culture in what they write about themselves and what they permit others to write about them. Therefore, you should read annual reports, paying special attention to the president's letter; interviews in the trade press with management; and even press releases. You may have to read between the lines to uncover attitudes and cultural beliefs, but the extra sleuthing will pay off.
 
Gathering Background on a Company's Corporate Culture
 
The role of the corporate culture in job placement cannot be underestimated these days. Executive recruiters mentally classify candidates and won't send someone to a company if he or she is not deemed a good cultural match. Prospective employer explains culture to you and, more importantly, they want you to act as if you understand their culture. So part of doing homework involves reading up on the personality of the company. This kind of information is now commonly found online but is more likely to be gathered from your own network contacts if you already have them set in place.
 
Some cultures are dominated by a hero. These are especially easy to spot and understand since they are dominated by one personality, usually a founder such as Tom Watson at IBM, Dave Packard at Hewlett-Packard, Helena Rubenstein at her cosmetics company, and Mary Kay Ash at Mary Kay Cosmetics.
 
Newer cultural heroes are Lee Iacocca at Chrysler and Frank Borman at Eastern Airlines—even ones in the technology sector like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and even Steve Jobs at Apple. If you can read something written by or about the hero, you will begin to understand the cultural milieu or the company. These can be gleaned from public reviews from employees online on such websites as Glassdoor, Indeed and LinkedIn.
 
Use your knowledge about the corporate culture to sell yourself. An understanding of the culture will help you plan what you say about such things as your job goals, your feelings about your career, and the relationship between your career and your personal interests.
 
Once you have a clear focus on the culture of a company, you are on your way to understanding the mentality and personality of the corporate officers. However, you should also do some specific research about the persons who are likely to interview you.
 
Be sure not to ignore the board members, either. If you're lucky, you'll know one or two, and they'll be invaluable contacts for you as you move through the hiring process. If you're using an executive recruiter, he or she will be able to fill you in on the personalities of the people you will be seeing, as well as on their management styles.
 
In doing this kind of personal research, look for ties you have in common--a shared school, club, or charitable interest. Find out about their career paths and whom they have worked for. Finding these connections will prove useful and reflect well on your research and networking skills.
 
When researching the CEO, the most important thing you can learn about them is their management style. Do they believe in management by objectives or management by participation? Are they supportive and well-liked, or are they more of a tyrant who is feared and maybe not even respected? Most top executives choose managers who emulate their management style, so if you know the CEO's management style, you can know just about everyone's management style in a company.
 
The best way to get this information, of course, is to talk to people who currently work for, or have worked for, the top managers, especially anyone whom you may be working for. Take what people say with a grain of salt, though, because someone who works for a tough manager may be inclined to rationalize his boss's behavior as a means of surviving, or the employee may even be cut from the same mold and therefore not be the best observer of that management style. Conversely, someone who has left the employment of a particularly difficult manager may paint a bleaker picture of that boss than is actually the case. Use your judgment to make sound decisions on the company based on your preferred management style.
 
See the following articles for more information:
 
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