• First of all, you may be able to identify problems that the company has, that your skills can solve for them. Identify the person with the power to hire, explain to him why you are in his best interests, and you may find yourself employed. The depth of research this requires is often beyond what you can get sitting at your computer, but you can at least get the basics, and identify your next steps, through intelligent research on the Net.
• If you have a job interview, learning all that you can about that organization reassures the interviewer that you cared enough to learn about the company before coming in for the interview. This involves research at its most basic level - their primary business, address, number of employees, etc. And the Internet is good at this basic sort of research.
• You are also researching a company in order to protect yourself from making a horrible mistake -taking a job that you'll soon have to quit, because of something that you didn't know, or didn't bother to find out, before you started there. The purpose of this sort of research is to find these time bombs before you agree to take the job.
  In such a case, what do you want to know? Well, think of the jobs you've had in the past, and try to recall the moment when you were about to leave that job - your decision or theirs. What is it, at that moment, you wish you had known before you took the job? This will give you your research topics. Items which suggest themselves are such things as:
  • What the real goals of the place were, instead of the puffery they put in their annual report.
  • What 'the corporate culture' was like, there: cold and clammy, or warm and appreciative.
  • What kinds of timelines they conducted their work under, and whether they were flexible or inflexible.
  • What the job was really like.
  • Whether the skills you care the most about, in yourself, would really get used. Or was all that talk about 'your skills' just window dressing to lure you there - and you, with your rich people skills, ended up spending your time pushing paper?
  • More about the boss, and what she or he was like, to work for. Ditto for your immediate supervisor(s).
  • What your co-workers were like: easy to get along with, or difficult? And who was which?
  • How close the company or organization was to having to lay off people, or how tight your department's budget was.

Can the Internet help with this kind of research? It depends on how deep you want to go, and, in some cases, how much money you want to spend - but spending money is no guarantee that you will find out all you want to know. Face it: there's only so much the Internet can do. If you're going to go deeper, and find out the information you really want to know, you're going to need to supplement this online research with some offline research - meaning you'll have to go talk to people, using your contacts, to thoroughly research the companies that interest you. More on people in the Contacts & Networking chapter.