Using the Internet to Prepare for an Interview

It’s normal to be anxious before an interview, but proper preparation is a great way to calm your nerves. One way to prepare is by investigating your potential employer, and a lot of your research can be done online.

Before you go for an interview, you should visit the website of your prospective employer. This can provide you with a wealth of useful information, including background on the company’s inception, details about their past and current projects, and profiles of key personnel. If you know the history of an organisation, then you will have a better understanding of its evolution and mission. It is vital for you to be familiar with their previous and current projects, because most employers want to know what you will do for their company if they decide to hire you. If you know what they’ve accomplished in the past and what they hope to do in the future, then you can discuss how your skill set can help the organisation achieve its goals. Before going in for an interview, it’s important to know who all the key players are in a company, especially if you have common ground, such as degrees from the same university or experience at a particular organisation.

Once you have a general understanding of the company you’re going to interview with, find out if they use social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. If they have a Facebook page or Twitter account, then pay attention to their posts and the comments from other users. This will give you a better understanding of the nature of the company: if they tend to be very informal on Facebook and Twitter, then they’ll probably be a bit more relaxed and casual during the interview; if they usually use a formal tone, then you can expect your interviewer to be a bit more conservative and professional. Also, their Facebook and Twitters updates may give you insight into their current projects, latest achievements, and common problems. When you know the types of issues a company faces, then you can tell your interviewer how you would be able to solve some of their problems. If a company’s Facebook page has a lot of unhappy customers complaining about a particular issue, or if people are criticizing them on Twitter, then you can almost guarantee it is a problem the company would like to resolve quickly.

LinkedIn is another great site to use when preparing for a job interview, and it is completely free to join. LinkedIn can give you tons of useful information about the key personnel at your prospective employer, including their work history, education, interests, and the people they network with. All of this information will help you get a feel for what your potential employer is all about, which is incredibly valuable when preparing for a job interview.

I do have one word of warning about using social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to prepare for job interviews: while you may be tempted to make contact with potential employers via these websites, I don’t generally recommend it. Some companies may misinterpret this as harassment or desperation, and it could end up actually hurting your chances of getting the job.