The Interview: Tell me what you know about our company?

By Elizabeth Butler, Dreamfedjob editor

This question falls into this category as the new employer will be assuming that you want to join their company because it is a sound and progressive career move for you. It is, isn’t it? That’s a hint … Again, this question will come up time after time. If you follow Dreamfedjob’s blog, this question has been addressed before. It is one that you expect to be asked. Right? So you ‘Googled’ them, right? You went onto the corporate website and took some notes, facts and figures.

Well, you employ some 23,000 people around the world, your main areas of operation are outsourcing and managed services, systems integration and consulting services, high-end server technology, cybersecurity and cloud management software, and maintenance and support services, your …Zzzzzz – I’m asleep already. Anybody can repeat facts from a website. It doesn’t mean you know anything about the company at all.

Now while I’m not suggesting that you don’t quote them some devastatingly interesting statistics around their niche market specialisms etc., what I am saying is get behind the facts that they present to you. What is their market share? Who are their competitors? What threats are there to their continuing growth? What opportunities might they wish to exploit? What did their CEO say in their last annual report?

By all means go the company’s website, but don’t just settle for the company line. Find out who their competitors are and what they are saying. Start by going to SEC.gov and see what the company is up to. For this example I am pretending to have an interview with Unisys Corp as a Data Analyst/Developer job.

After 10 minutes on SEC.gov I found this:

• Revenue for the nine months ended September 30, 2014 was $2,450.6 million compared with $2,460.6 million for the nine months ended September 30, 2013. Services revenue over the first nine months of 2014 declined 1% and technology revenue increased 2% in the first nine months of 2014 due to higher sales of enterprise-class software and servers.
• Revenue from the company’s enterprise-class software and servers increased 96.5% for the three months ended September 30, 2014 compared with the three months ended September 30, 2013. The increase was due to higher sales of the company’s ClearPath products.
• More than half of the company’s total revenue is derived from international operations.
• There is legal case pending regarding a lawsuit between Unisys Belgium SA-NV, a Unisys subsidiary, and the Ministry of Justice of Belgium.
• There is another legal case pending where Lufthansa AG sued Unisys Deutschland GmbH, a Unisys subsidiary (Unisys Germany), in the District Court of Frankfurt, Germany, for allegedly failing to perform properly its obligations during the initial phase of a 2004 software design.
• There is also a matter arising from the sale of Unisys’ Health Information Management (HIM) business to Molina Information Systems, LLC (Molina) under a 2010 Asset Purchase Agreement (APA).

Can you imagine interviewing five people and all of them trot out the same facts and figures taken from the same source? What if the sixth interviewee reminds you that in 2011 you were ranked number 7 in Information Technology Services by Fortune 500 Magazine; however, Peter A. Altabef, the new President and Chief Executive Officer effective January 1, 2015, with experience leading MICROS Systems, Inc., Perot Systems and Dell Inc. has a strategy in place to take you to number one in 2015, and that involves … No contest! Get him/her back for a final interview!

I’m asking you to be a bit smarter than the average bear on this one. Be creative about how you illustrate what you know about their company.