Thursday, July 29, 2010

The Importance of Due Diligence


Earlier this week I had an interview with a company out in Texas. Although the firm is based in San Antonio and thus far too close to Dallas for my tastes - growing up a Redskin fan does entail certain unavoidable idiosyncrasies you eventually learn to live with - I decided that given the current economic climate, I should at least keep my options open as far as relocation if the right job presented itself.

It turned out that this was not that job.

Well, to put it more precisely, the job may be right, but I learned very quickly that the firm wasn't. I also learned yet another lesson in the importance of doing one's homework in advance of any interviews. Allow me to elaborate.

I first heard about the firm on Linked In. One of the groups I belonged to ran an ad announcing a new position with this company. I clicked on the link, read through the job description, and found that the job looked like a strong match for my background and skills. I dropped the fellow a quick e-mail, and long story short, he wrote back and said he would forward my name & resume to one of the company recruiters and that I should expect a call.

Fantastic, I thought. We're off and running.

As part of any interview, I did some checking on the company's Web site to learn more about the work it does, what its history was like, where I thought my skills might be a strong benefit, etc. But I also did some additional checking on sites like Glassdoor.com, Hoovers, Jigsaw, and the Vault. What I found made my jaw drop.

No one had anything nice to say about the firm.

"Well, hold on," I told myself. "Every company's got some disgruntled employees, and it's not like anyone who is happy out there is going to go the extra mile to cheer the company or refute the gripes of a few bad apples." Besides, anyone with half a brain knows not to trust everything that appears on the Internet, right? But I kept digging and digging, and the more I found, the more concerned I became.

Someone actually started an anti-company blog about this place. I found the blog and read every entry. The gripes - high turnover, low morale, bad management - all paralleled the comments I saw on the business Web sites. The blog had had hundreds of visitors, and no one refuted any claims.

Now granted, this could simply be a vast outpouring of negativity by a few disgruntled people. And there's no way of knowing just how many of those hundreds of visitors to the anti-company blog were repeat ones or people telling their friends to check out their "gripe site." But the impact it had on me was admittedly quite strong. "Let's see, do I really want to move across the country to take a job with a company that has such a bad reputation on the Internet?" I wondered. Sure, there was always the chance that the vitriol I was seeing was misplaced or inaccurate, but did I want to take that kind of chance with a job? Put another way, if I accepted a position and moved across the country - and that would be at my own expense, I later learned, since the firm would not cover the relo - and the gripes did turn out to be valid, how would I feel then?

So what did I do? I went through the interview - it never hurts to have practice in answering the typical initial questions - but inquired at the end what the interviewer thought former employees would say about the firm. "Oh, I'm sure they would say it's a great place to work," she told me. "I've been here five years." When I pointed out the negativity on the Internet, she was - understandably - dismissive. "Every company has that element," she said.

I couldn't have agreed with her more, but the fact remains that other firms don't have anti-company blog sites about them with complaints that echo comments on job research sites. Sure, some do, and some are probably valid while others aren't. But if you're a job seeker looking for information about a firm and you come across multiple sources saying the same things - and all of them bad - you might be forgiven for deciding it's better to take your chances elsewhere with a different company.

Moral: Remember the old adage about looking before leaping. You may save yourself a great deal of future trouble through a bit of caution now.

No comments:

Post a Comment