Pre-Interview Research

By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter discusses several ways to do pre-interview research so that you are well prepared for your interview.

I’m Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter. I coach people. I do career and leadership coaching.

I’m the head coach for JobSearch.Community. I can’t believe I haven’t done this subject before. In all these years, I haven’t done a video about pre-interview research. Well, I’m going to do it now and the long of the short of it is less experienced people minimize the importance of pre-interview research and for those of you who are more experienced, you know how useful it can be to your preparation.

Let me walk you through whether you’re experienced, whether you’re a veteran individual or a less experienced person, some of the ways that you can research prior to the interview. Now, I believe you started off with doing company research. You want to be able to answer the question, what do you know about our firm and why do you want to work here? Now, I’ve got videos on why do you want to work here.

But what do you know about our company? You want to be able to speak positively. So, obviously, you can go to the website. You can do a Google search.

You know, you can look at the job description in advance. That helps you prepare vis-a-vis the job. If you’re working with a recruiter, you can talk with them about what they know about the firm and about the hiring manager.

The website, as I said, google the firm and its products. Take a look at their LinkedIn profile. Do a YouTube search.

Talk to people within your network, particularly when you start getting to the hiring manager. Now, when you’re looking at the interviewer, you do a google search, which is going to take you to LinkedIn and you take a look at their LinkedIn profiles to get a sense of commonality. What do you have in common with this person? Might you know someone who they’ve worked with previously at another organization? What’s their academic background like? What’s their professional history like? Because these are signals for their background and what their interests are.

Do an X search. See if they’re on Twitter. And just see the kinds of things that they’re posting, or they’re sharing, or they’re commenting on because this will give you a sense of their personality and their thought process.

Are they in particular LinkedIn groups? Are they liking and sharing particular types of information on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook? It’s a quick thing. It doesn’t take a lot of time. But the other thing is, always tap into your personal network.

They may know people. If you know that this person worked at, I don’t know, Facebook previously, or Google, or Microsoft, or Goldman, or whomever, and you know someone who worked there around the same time, see if you might be able to reach out to them. If they know them, if they can dig a little bit, give you some feedback or information, that would be useful.

I know last week, I was coaching someone who was doing an interview. And he was meeting a group director, someone in an SVP level, running things multidivisionally for an organization. And he was told, this is a no-nonsense guy, very serious.

You have to deal with him in a serious manner. And that was very helpful to him. And he got that from his network of relationships who knew this individual.

You want to be able to just get a sense of what you’re stepping into, and how they’re going to respond, because it just helps you feel comfortable. And with comfort, most people are able to perform better than if they’re walking in cold. So, I hope you found this helpful.

And I also want to encourage you, visit my website, which is TheBigGameHunter.us. There is a ton there in the blog that you can watch, listen to or read that will help you find work more quickly. And I also want to mention, if you’re interested in my coaching you, reach out to me. I’d love to do interview preparation with you, as well as the other gamut of things that I do in coaching someone through a job search.

Reach out to me to connect on LinkedIn at Linkedin.com/in/TheBigGameHunter.us. I mentioned that you saw the video because I just like knowing that I’m helping folks. And once we’re connected, message me that you’re interested in coaching. We’ll schedule a time for a free discovery call.

Hope you have a great day. Take care