Quick, Everyone Look Happy. We’re Recruiting: Researching a Company Before You Apply

You’ve found a job. The salary looks decent, the role actually sounds interesting and, unusually, you meet the requirements without having to convince yourself that “some exposure to” means the same thing as five years’ experience. So you do what most sensible people do before applying and have a look at the company.

This is excellent news.

Everyone is having a fantastic time.

LinkedIn is full of smiling employees. TikTok has a video of the office. There was pizza last Thursday, somebody brought a dog in on Friday and six people from Finance recently went bowling. There’s a photograph of the Managing Director wearing a Christmas jumper and somebody from Marketing has interviewed Chloe about why she absolutely loves being part of such an amazing team.

You haven’t even applied yet and already you’re wondering why your current employer never bought a table football machine.

Welcome to employer branding.

There’s nothing wrong with it. Companies want good people to work for them and good people increasingly research companies before deciding whether to apply. The CIPD describes employer branding as the way an organisation presents what it offers employees and how it differentiates itself from other employers. In other words, companies aren’t only selling you the job anymore. They’re selling you what working there is supposedly going to be like.

The important word there is supposedly.

Because you’re looking at advertising.

It may be perfectly accurate advertising. The people in the photograph may genuinely love working there. Chloe may wake up every morning delighted that she gets to spend another eight hours in Accounts Receivable. The summer party might genuinely have been brilliant.

But the company chose what you’re seeing.

Nobody posts the photograph from the Tuesday afternoon when half the department was furious because three people had resigned and nobody was being replaced. There isn’t normally a TikTok entitled “Our Manager Hasn’t Spoken to Kevin Since April”. You rarely see a LinkedIn carousel celebrating the fourth restructure in eighteen months.

That doesn’t make the social media dishonest.

It makes it social media.

And if you’re seriously considering working somewhere, I’d look a little further.

Start with the people who already work there. LinkedIn is useful for considerably more than watching people announce that they’re “thrilled” about things. Search the company. Look at how long employees stay. Look at the people doing the sort of job you’re considering. Have they been there six months or six years? Do people seem to progress internally? Where did former employees go afterwards? Is the company constantly recruiting the same position?

None of those things gives you a definitive answer.

They give you questions.

And questions are useful.

Employee reviews can help too, provided you don’t lose all sense of proportion while reading them. Indeed’s guidance on company reviews points out that reviews can give candidates an insight into management, work-life balance, pay and company culture, while also warning that individual reviews are subjective.

Which is fairly obvious when you think about it.

One former employee giving the company one star and writing 1,700 words about Susan from HR does not constitute a public inquiry.

But patterns matter.

If one person says the management is terrible, perhaps they hated their manager. If twenty people over three years say progression is nonexistent, the workload is ridiculous and senior management communicates exclusively through restructures, I might investigate further before signing anything.

The positive reviews matter as well. If people repeatedly talk about good managers, flexibility, development and being trusted to do their jobs, that tells you something. You’re not looking for a company with no negative reviews. I’m not convinced such a company exists. You’re trying to build a more realistic picture than the one produced by the person responsible for the corporate Instagram account.

The obsession with “culture” makes this particularly important.

Culture has somehow become beer fridges, pizzas, beanbags, away days and spending even more time with the people you already spend most of your waking week with. Yet when Acas asked British employees about workplace social activities, 31% said they disliked team-building activities and one in five disliked after-work drinks.

Perhaps free beer isn’t quite the employment revolution we thought it was.

What actually matters is much harder to photograph.

What happens when your child is ill? What happens when you make a mistake? Does your manager trust you? Are people promoted fairly? Can you disagree with somebody senior? Do people actually take their annual leave? Does “flexible working” mean flexible working or does it mean you may work from home occasionally if there’s a solar eclipse?

That’s culture.

And the interview is where you can start finding out.

Candidates often forget this because interviews have somehow become an exam in which the employer asks all the questions and you desperately try to produce the correct answers.

Then, right at the end, they ask whether you have any questions and you say something about progression because Google told you that sounds ambitious.

Ask something you actually want to know.

Why is the position available? How long was the previous person there? Where have other people in the team progressed to? What does hybrid working look like in reality? How long has the manager been managing the team? What tends to make somebody successful there?

What happened to the last person who held the job?

You don’t need to interrogate them under a bright light.

You’re trying to understand the place where you may spend the next few years of your life.

And pay attention to how they answer.

If the job advert says there are “excellent progression opportunities” but nobody can think of anyone who has progressed, that’s useful. If “two days in the office” suddenly becomes “we generally encourage people to be visible”, that’s useful too. If the person interviewing you has been promoted three times and can give you actual examples of other people who have done the same, brilliant.

This is also why I wouldn’t wait until you’re offered the job before doing any of this.

People become remarkably forgiving once there’s £55,000 sitting in front of them.

Things that looked slightly odd during the interview suddenly become “probably fine”. The vague answer about staff turnover doesn’t seem quite as important. The journey you thought was too long becomes manageable. The three days in the office that were supposed to be two become something you’ll “work out”.

Then six months later you’re paying someone like me to rewrite your CV again.

I’ve written before about applying for the wrong jobs, and choosing the wrong employer is really the other half of the same problem. Getting an interview isn’t the objective. Even getting an offer isn’t the objective.

Getting the right job is.

So research the company.

Look at LinkedIn. Look at TikTok. Read the website. Read the reviews. Look at the people who work there and the people who used to. Ask questions at the interview. Then make your own mind up.

The company will certainly be doing its homework on you.

It seems only fair that you do some on them.