The Most Important Pre-Interview Research No One’s Told You About
It’s important to do pre-interview research. Most of the advice out there is about doing research as it pertains to us: the job we want, the company we want, the salary and benefits package we want. While all of that is essential to getting clear on what you’re coming to the table with, it also keeps the focus on you.
To crush your interview (and genuinely connect with your potential employer), you have to also move your focus onto them. Put yourself in their shoes. How is the company doing? Where is the momentum and where is the stress? If this were a play, what is the overarching drama and what specific role does your job play in it? Thinking like this help you to see the context: the bigger picture beyond yourself that you will be entering into.
Some other research is to think about the industry overall. Who are the players and what is this company doing in the bigger scheme of things? How does this role - and your energy towards it - contribute to a bigger picture? Thinking, or journaling, about the greater purpose will help you develop a clear point of view that will help you stand out in an interview. It simply shifts the perspective: from you proving yourself to them, to you aligning with a deeper purpose.
Then, there is the person interviewing you. It is easy for the employer to become un-human in the imagination. They become simply a gatekeeper: someone who will give us what we want, or not. But sitting at the gate is a real person, who had a good or bad morning, who is experiencing a specific emotion, who needs something from this interview just as you do.
Some research prompts to humanize the employer: Who is the person ultimately responsible for hiring you? What is their name? What was their job before this one? Where did they go to school? Do they have a family? Have they written, or talked, publicly about any specific topics? This exercise, while admittedly edging towards internet-stalking, is called “humanizing the employer”. Do this for any of the major stakeholders involved in the hiring process. Research them. Read their social media posts. Learn what their interests are.
Observe your feelings as you learn about these people. Do you judge them? Feel intimidated? Covet something they have? Have anxiety that they won’t like you? Since this exercise lives in the mental realm, it also helps expose what mental projections you are coming to the hiring table with. See if you can journal some of those projections out, or talk to your therapist to work through them. Arrive at the table if not clear of your own baggage (sidebar - we all have it), then consciously aware of it. This will reduce the power of your mental projections as being the unconscious driver in your job-seeking process.
Can you find where you feel excited to meet them? Did they write a research paper on the same topic as your thesis? That’s a conversation starter when you go into an interview. Did you grow up in the same city? That’s a light “PS” to add to the end of your email submitting your resume. A note about tone: when you drop these personal details into the exchange, it’s a light sprinkle - this is still a formal interview process, and the attention should be there. If it’s going to detract from the real conversation, don’t throw it in. Also, check yourself for manipulation: drop these human-connecters in only if you feel genuinely excited about that - the human connection. If you are dropping them in because you’re trying to snake your way in to get a job, the other person will smell that a mile off and it will have the opposite effect. People can always tell when they are being manipulated. On the flip, find your sincere point of connection and they will feel the authenticity in that. If you can’t say any of these things authentically, don’t. The most important thing (more than anything you say), is for you to see them as human, to feel connected to them somehow, and hold that in the force field as you engage in the interview process.
