Researching Companies

The Internet is a marvelous resource for digging out facts about prospective employers. Just make sure to choose the right tools.

By Brett Pyrtle, Star Tribune Sales and Marketing

Last update: October 26, 2009 - 11:36 AM

In an employment market that remains stubbornly tight, job seekers need to do more than respond to job postings and build their personal networks. In fact, taking time to learn key details about a prospective employer and company can often provide the edge that results in interviews or offer letters.

To illustrate the point, consider the results from a recent survey of senior human resources, finance and marketing leaders at some of the nation's largest companies. In that report, leaders said the biggest single mistake job applicants made was a lack of demonstrated knowledge about their companies. That single miscue outpaced the second-place answer - a lack of preparedness to discuss skills and experience - by a ratio of nearly 3-to-1.

Because the Web offers an almost endless set of resources, it can be difficult to choose the right tools for online company research. However, here are some tried and true sites that can help provide a closer look at prospective employers:

Company websites. Ironically, many job seekers never look beyond the employment section of a company's online presence. By spending a few minutes on a broader review, candidates will most likely find a company overview, listings of key business divisions and leaders, markets served and recent news releases. If the company is publicly traded, the website will typically also have the most recent annual report.

Public companies. For a deep dive on a company's financials, leaders and market performance, try the EDGAR (www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml) database operated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. For tools that provide easier-to-digest nuggets on public companies, consider specialized Web-search sites such as Yahoo Finance (finance.yahoo.com/).

Private companies. While information provider Hoovers (www.hoovers.com) has a comprehensive listing of public companies, it also provides good data about leaders, markets, financials and competitors of large and midsized private firms. For smaller private companies, consider using Manta (www.manta.com), which claims to have profiles on 60 million businesses worldwide.

People and places. Job seekers on LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) can conduct custom searches on prospective employers, most often by people or by jobs posted to the site. Many businesses now have institutional LinkedIn profiles, which can be accessed by a simple keyword search by company name.

Rankings and rants. In recent years, so-called "best places to work" listings have provided snapshots into the culture of various employers. One of the best-known lists is generated by the Great Place to Work Institute (www.greatplacetowork.com), which produces the Fortune 100 Best Places to Work list for large employers, as well as separate rankings for mid-size and small employers. For discussions that cover both the good - and bad - aspects of working with certain employers, try the discussions section on Vault (www.vault.com).

Brett Pyrtle is principal of Turning Point Communications LLC, a marketing communications firm based in St. Paul.

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