What Color Is Your Parachute 2018 by Richard N. Bolles copy

Fifth, You Need to Learn as Much as You Can About
a Place Before Formally Approaching Them
At some point you will be happy. You’ve found a career that you would
die to do. You’ve interviewed people actually doing that work, and you
like it even more. You’ve found names of places that hire people in that
career.
Okay, now what? Do you rush right over there? No, you research those
places first. This is an absolute must. Remember, companies and
organizations love to be loved. You demonstrate you love them when you
have taken the trouble to find out all about them, before you walk in.
That’s called research.
What is it you should research about places before you approach them
for a hiring-interview? Well, first of all, you want to know something
about the organization from the inside: what kind of work they do there.
Their style of working. Their so-called corporate culture. And what kinds
of goals they are trying to achieve, what obstacles or challenges they are
running into, and how your skills and knowledges can help them. In the
interview you must be prepared to demonstrate that you have something
they need. That begins with finding out what they need.
Secondly, you want to find out if you would enjoy working there. You
want to take the measure of those organizations. As I mentioned earlier,
everybody takes the measure of a workplace, but most job-hunters or
career-changers only do it after they are hired there. In the U.S., for
example, a survey of the federal/state employment service once found that
57% of those who found a job through that service were not working at
that job just thirty days later, and this was because they used the first ten or
twenty days on the job to find out they didn’t really like it there at all.