Hi Adam!

One of the more interesting jobs I had was building a 25-person team as quickly as possible. Our company had been acquired by a private equity firm, and they decided to build a team that would all work from the company headquarters. So I spent hours and hours reviewing resumes, interviewing candidates, and making hiring recommendations so we could staff the team as quickly and efficiently as possible.

I quickly found that resumes just weren't that useful for making hiring decisions. There were a couple reasons for this. First, our recruiting team was pre-screening candidates to make sure they could plausibly be a good fit for our team. Second, the requirements for our team were pretty clear, and we were hiring 25 people who would all do more or less the same job.

So the only way to decide who we would actually hire was to interview them. My boss—ultimately responsible for the entire team, and who had brought me in to help—would sit with me to try to narrow down the candidates that we should interview, and then we would each interview them independently.

After our interviews, we would compare notes and suggest whether we thought that person would be a good fit for our team. I found that we were usually on the same page, and the common variable wasn't technical proficiency—although we did require a pretty high level of that—the common variable in our hiring decision was how well the candidate demonstrated that they understood our business, what we were trying to accomplish, and how they would fit into that mission.

I later realized that what those successful candidates had done is to use positioning to stand out from all the other candidates. They were the ones who understood that their technical prowess was one tool of many that they would use to help the team as a whole succeed in its goals.

...

Here's how we described "positioning" last time:

And we looked at a couple examples: the two plumbers, and the before and after example of a Software Developer using positioning to stand out as the candidate for a developer job.

Heads-up! This is part 2 of 4 in a series on how to use positioning to stand out from other candidates in your job interviews. Click here to read Part 1

Here's the before and after of the answer to "Why should we hire you?" for our Software Developer example:

Before positioning

After positioning

In a nutshell, positioning is how you show a company that you're the person they need for a specific job.

But how do you do that? How did the Software Developer know the company was transitioning their application to Ruby on Rails?

Research!

Basic research you should do for each opportunity

You'll start with basic research and careful preparation for your interviews. Your goal is to learn enough about the company and job you're pursuing so that you understand exactly what they need. Once you have that information, you can tell them why you are exactly the candidate they need for the job.

Here's a short list of things you should look for as you discover exactly what the company needs:

• Company name
• Company size
• Mission statement
• Company goals
• Company challenges/struggles
• Company website and jobs page (a link to the specific job listing would be great, plus a link to their generic jobs page)
• What types of other jobs are they trying to fill right now? How many of each type?
• A summary of what you know about the company from blog posts, news, experience with their products, etc.
• Are they growing? How quickly?

Knowing that information before you go into an interview will help you be prepared to talk about the specific company and job you're considering. And, more importantly, you'll be able to tell a more detailed story about how their company will be better if you're a part of it.

Where to find that information

So where do you start? There are two main places where you'll find pretty much everything you need: their company website, and Google.

This doesn't need to be complicated—you're simply doing the work that others won't do. Here are the types of information you're looking for:

• Company website—You're particularly interested in their homepage, their "Careers" or "Jobs" page, and their "About" page.
• News and articles about them—Are other people talking about this company? What are they saying?
• Blogs—If they have a corporate blog, read a few entries to see what they're talking about right now; if there are other blogs written about the company, see what others are saying about the company.
• Financial reports—If the company is publicly traded, then they're required to file 10-Q (quarterly) and 10-K (annual) financial reports. You don't have to read the entire thing, but the first page is usually pretty enlightening.

In general, bigger companies will have more information available than smaller companies. That's ok. For now, you're just gathering whatever useful information you can find with a simple search.

Action items

It's often better to start with a real-world example when learning a new concept. So here are three action items to get you started:

• Identify a job at a company that you are a good fit for. If you don't have any jobs in mind, use your current job at your current company.
• Complete the items on the list I shared above (Company name, Company size, etc.) for that job and company.
• Hit reply and send your research to me. I might use your research as my example in next week's article!

Next time, I'll show you how to turn that research into strong positioning.

Have a great week!

Josh