Research companies you'd like to work for
Build a shortlist of companies that excite you and dig into their culture, openings, and growth.
- Time:
- 60 min
- Cost:
- free
- Difficulty:
- easy
- Where:
- Indoors
- Best:
- Solo
When you research companies you'd like to work for before you need a job, you get something rare: a shortlist built on judgement rather than urgency. An hour now means that when a role appears you already know whether the company is worth the application, instead of deciding from a careers page in a hurry.
Why research companies you'd like to work for is worth an hour
The signals that predict a good experience are mostly outside the company's control, which is exactly why they are useful. Employee tenure, how leadership writes when they are not selling, whether the engineering or design blog is maintained, how the company behaved in its last bad quarter. None of that appears in recruitment material, and all of it is public.
How to research companies you'd like to work for step by step
- 1
Start from people, not companies
Find five people doing work you want to do. Look at where they work now and where they came from. That list is your seed.
- 2
Check tenure distribution
Scan a dozen employee profiles. Lots of eighteen-month exits at the same level is a stronger signal than any review site.
- 3
Read what leadership writes unprompted
Blog posts, conference talks, incident write-ups. Voluntary writing reveals priorities that recruitment copy is designed to hide.
- 4
Find the last bad news
Search for layoffs, funding trouble, or a public failure. How they communicated during it tells you more than any values page.
- 5
Record it in a simple table
Company, why it interests you, one concern, one person you could talk to. Four columns is enough to be useful later.
Tips to get more out of it
- Weight recent Glassdoor reviews by role. A great experience in sales tells you little about the same company's finance team.
- Note who left recently and where they went. Departures cluster around the same underlying reason more often than they scatter.
- Keep the list to fifteen or fewer, otherwise you will never revisit it and the whole exercise evaporates.
Ways to mix it up
If you are happy where you are, run the exercise on your own employer as a control and see how it scores against the outsiders. If you are considering a career change, research the field first and let the companies fall out of that rather than starting from brand names.
Research companies you'd like to work for: frequently asked questions
Should I trust Glassdoor reviews?
In aggregate and by department, yes. Individual reviews skew toward people who left angry or were asked to post something positive.
How many companies should be on my list?
Ten to fifteen. Enough that a hiring freeze at one does not matter, few enough that you can genuinely keep track of them.
Is it worth researching before I am job hunting?
That is the best time. You research more honestly with nothing at stake, and you are ready when a role appears unexpectedly.
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