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The Job Hunters Chronicles

DotCom VP: Company Research Beyond the Job Posting

Criticizing a company may not be the best strategy to get a job. But being able to show you've really studied its products, warts and all, is a huge benefit of online research tools.

By Dave Fox, Madison, WI

I am an executive at a dot-com who is in the happy situation of working from a remote office in my longtime hometown, which was important to me in my job search.  While I worked my way up to my current position, my path at the company started out with an online job search, using tactics that really worked for me, but that I might not quite recommend for anyone else unless they were in some very specific circumstances.

When I landed my job, I had been actively searching for a few months, and was getting frustrated by the experience.  There was inadequate or no response to resumes I posted and online applications I sent through various job boards and employer forms.  At first, I had quite a few responses to posting my resume on Monster and a couple of other big job boards, but I became irritated when I realized that nearly all of the inquiries were from third-party recruiters, not actual hiring managers. I was flattered at first, but it didn't take long to notice that these recruiters were asking for an awful lot of my time preparing various materials and going through all kinds of pre-screening. They'd often correspond with me by phone or email over a couple of weeks until suddenly there was a deafening silence and they were never to be heard from again.  Often, it seemed like they hadn't really read my resume or online profile very carefully, contacting me about jobs that were completely  unrelated to my area or stated preferences.

I had better response on small, specialized job boards or listservs related to my interests, where there might not be a lot of postings but you got a sense there was "somebody home".  I got a couple of invitations for phone interviews with a real person at a few companies, and although these didn't pan out in the end, I appreciated knowing there was a human being at the other end, and I also found that I learned a lot more about the companies by having this interaction with their HR reps. I also found in these interviews that they often seemed honestly interested to know whether I had reviewed their websites and company closely, and whether I had any ideas or observations that would be helpful.  This was a small revelation for me. I think in earlier, unsuccessful interviews with recruiters, I had focused so much on just studying the job specifications and having the "right answers" that seemed to make me fit the job description. This makes sense because that's all third-party recruiters have to go on, and they're hired to be "gatekeepers". But often, those who actually work for the hiring company seem more interested in learning things about you that are much more subtle than just what's written down as a "requirement" in the original job description.

This experience made me stop relying on just posting my resume. Although I still used the job boards to search postings, I generally started to zero in on jobs where it seemed clear from the contact information that applications would not go through an outside recruiter first.  I also started regarding the Internet much more as a super-powerful research tool for my job search than as an automating mechanism that would get me a job. Instead of shooting my resume to a zillion jobs just because Web tools make it easy, I tried to find a few select places where I thought I might want to work, regardless of the advertised position, and spent my energies researching everything I could about them. If I saw a great company that was hiring for a job above or below my level, but in an area or department that interested me, I took this as a good sign and applied or wrote to them anyway, figuring they might be expanding in the area and would eventually have a position that would suit me.

That brought me to my current job.  When I came to the site, they were not advertising a position in my area. However, while researching, I saw that they had published a lot of information and content that was in my area, and I identified many mistakes in the content as well as technical errors in its presentation on the site.  I wrote to them mentioning a few of the many problems I had found published on their site. Although I was respectful, and also indicated an interest in learning about their hiring plans, it was clear I thought their site "needed work". I was surprised when I got a same-day response from the company President asking me what I thought was wrong with the site. I spent a good time amount of time enumerating my critiques of the content, and establishing the degrees and my previous work experience that I felt gave me some authority to make them.  I'd also used some free, Web-based site analysis tools I'd used in past work to get a quick picture of how well the site was built, positioned for search engines and links, etc. and was able to offer some helpful tips about bugs I'd found and opportunities for improvement that he might want t oshare with the webmaster.

This back and forth went on for a few rounds, and I began feeling a little resentful of the time I was taking for this (when I should have been applying for jobs, after all).  I was about to drop it when I was amazed to get a final challenge from the president that said, in effect, "Okay, if you think you can do a better job, why don't you prove it? Send me your resume and name a consulting fee, and let's see what you can do in a month".  I joined as a part-time consultant, and I guess it worked out well, because I was quickly offered a full-time position, and promoted steadily since then.

I am definitely not saying this approach is for everyone or every organizational culture.  In fact, because I didn't know how the new gig would go, I kept applying to other dot-coms for a while and decided to try the same approach. I would really study a site that I was interested in, analyzing its performance and rankings, looking for flaws and bugs that would definitely bother me if I ran the site, and sending these in a cover letter.  I quickly learned that criticizing the company you're applying to only works if you are addressing a direct employer and a real decision-maker -- one who is not at all insecure, who is passionate about exhibiting the best possible product, and who has a pretty good sense of humor.  Insulting your prospective employer is definitely not going to help you get past a "middleman" recruiter or HR reviewer who is responsible for "screening out the whackos".

But I still think I learned an important underlying lesson: The Internet provides the opportunity to not just find a company of interest, but to conduct extensive and meaningful research into its way of doing business so that you are equipped to speak knowledgably with hiring managers, to correspond and network with them, and to "show and prove" that you have concrete skills and ideas to contribute from day one. 

And also, just shooting off a quick resume in application to the jobs you see posted on job boards is really only the beginning.  It is a chance to stick a foot in the door.  But what will get you a job is how you persist to go on and present yourself as an asset, to really know your target, and to spend the time cultivating a connection with the organization.