5 Simple Steps You Should Take Before Accepting a Job
Sep 1, 2019 | 4 minutes read
5 Simple Steps You Should Take Before Accepting a Job
1. See who’s working there now.
Find out who is already working there on LinkedIn. This will let you know the ratio of non-techies to engineers, which might tell us something. If there are 15 employees and one engineer, then they could see you as a “computer guy” that can fix any technology-related issue they may have in the business or their personal lives. This may be a good or bad thing depending on what you desire.
If they do have other engineers, do they appear to have a lot of career growth? What are their skills on LinkedIn? What were their previous jobs? If some of the lead engineers came from a big, bureaucratic company, then they may have taken that mindset with them to this new company. If they came from small startups, then they may have a fast and loose culture. Of course, none of this is certain but may help to steer you depending on what you have in mind for an ideal work environment.
It also might be worth signing up for the LinkedIn Premium for a few months to gauge a company before accepting a position there. It could save you from a year of pain. For example, LinkedIn will show you if a company has a high turnover rate, or if they have been hiring like crazy recently.
2. Check out their financial position.
I, love the startup lifestyle. Things move fast, it’s exciting, but it is a bit risky. Before a company reaches break-even, it’s hard to tell whether or not they will be there in a year or not. With startups, the group or the individual that is investing can decide to cut their loses at any moment.
Now, I can’t say that working at a big company is safe either. Even a titan like Verizon cut 2,500 IT jobs and laid off 44,000 people in 2018.
If the company is public, then you can Google search last year’s financial documents and see for yourself how well they are doing. If not, then you could use a site like Hoovers.com to get an estimate on how good the company is doing in sales. Even though the site is only an estimate, it has been fairly accurate in my experience when I got a chance to compare it to actual sales numbers for companies that I worked for. It doesn’t tell you whether or not they are profitable, but if a company has 50 employees on LinkedIn, but Hoovers estimates that they make less than $250K a year in sales, then I would bet that they haven’t hit break-even yet.
3. Check out their products.
Some companies won’t have their products accessible for you to just browse. They may build applications for hospitals and doctors, which are only accessible for health care professionals. Or they may build apps for the government. But if they do have a product that is accessible, then how does it look?
If the product looks trashy or rushed, then that may indicate that their culture or processes don’t prioritize quality. The poor quality may be because of poor management, or low morale. Or it might be the reason that they are looking at hiring you.
4. Follow the company on social media.
Most companies will have a Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn account. Follow them and check out what they are posting about. Is there a separate account for their developers? If so, that’s great because they have time to write about the cool things they are doing or the technologies they are working with. Have they not posted in over a year? If not, then this might mean that they are going through a transition right now. In my experience, the social media presense increases once they want to spread awareness and increase sales. It stops when they either give up, or they are focused on some significant internal changes.
5. Look at their GlassDoor profile.
This is one of my favorite things to do when gauging a company because it can say so much. Check out their GlassDoor profile. And more specifically, look at the current job listings. Are they hiring a new CTO? If so, then that could mean that you’re walking into mess that they are trying to clean up. Are they hiring a bunch of InfoSec guys? That could mean that there’s been a security incident recently. Also, GlassDoor is geat for giving us insight into other employees salaries and experiences while working there ot during the interview process.
All and all, GlassDoor is a great resource. You may have to create an account and login in order to see everything they have.
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