Chapter 16

Discovering a Company’s Needs

In This Chapter

Staying up-to-date on your target industry so that you know what’s going on

Identifying the needs, struggles, and strategies of your target companies

Determining what hiring managers really care about so you can speak their language

Thanks to basic brain chemistry, every person on the face of this planet is walking around thinking about his or her problems and aspirations — and your future boss is no exception.

If you can find out what this potential employer is concerned with — meaning his needs, problems, and desires — then your job search will be more effective. Out of all the hundreds of job candidates a hiring manager sorts through, he’ll pay particular attention to you because by using the info provided in this chapter, you’ll be able to show him that you’re the solution to his company’s problems.

The trick to finding out what a company (and, therefore, that company’s hiring manager) is concerned with is to do a little research. Thanks to social media and its real-time applications, you can easily find out what’s likely at the top of a hiring manager’s mind right now. This chapter shows you how to use social media sites to keep up with what’s going on in your industry (and companies) of choice. It also reveals how to draw conclusions based on the wealth of information you’re sure to find so you can make it clear that you can help the company with whatever it needs.

Staying on Top of Industry News with the Help of Social Media

In the old job-search paradigm, figuring out what a hiring manager cared about without conducting extensive interviews was particularly difficult. Now with social media resources, you can pretty much determine what people care about, what goals they’re trying to achieve, and what industry problems they’re trying to overcome. Find out for yourself by checking out the social media websites and tools I describe in the next sections.

The key to any social media campaign is to make sure you’re listening. Professionals are always talking; they’re just hoping you’re actually listening to what they have to say.

Finding the top news websites for your industry

As you begin your listening campaign to figure out what your target hiring managers care about, make sure you’re up-to-speed on industry trends by reviewing the latest industry news. (This advice is particularly helpful if you’ve been laid off for a while.)

The news industry has shifted away from quarterly trade rags to real-time, user-generated content and research online. Find the top ten, industry-relevant, news sites and blogs, and then make a habit of reading them daily. The following sources are great for finding industry information:

Alltop: This site is like an online magazine rack in that it serves as a directory of the web's top blogs and news sources based on category. Go to www.alltop.com and type your field or industry in the search bar at the top. Alltop then recommends categories for you to choose from.

Create a MyAlltop account to customize your online magazine rack. You can add and reorganize news feeds from any category you choose. Then, when you’re looking for news, just visit your customized MyAlltop account and get a fast overview of the top five articles from news sources you’ve already deemed important.

Technorati: Technorati is one of the most well-known blog directories. After navigating to the site at www.technorati.com, click on the Tags link (located just below the list of drop-down menus on the home page) to see a list of topics listed in the directory.

Helium: Helium (www.helium.com) is a user-generated-content news website. Its articles aren't as time bound as other news sites, but they're very well written. In the Browse Channels column on the right-hand side of the web page is a list of topics that may be relevant to your target industry.

Examiner.com: Examiner.com is also a user-generated news site. Although topics tend to be less polished, they're more time relevant. Go to www.examiner.com and move your mouse cursor over the News & Info drop-down menu (found on the far right just below the examiner.com banner) to find industry-related categories.

Examiner.com delivers news items specific to a location. Each major city has its own Examiner.com site with different people writing for each location. So this is a great source for getting local trends and industry news.

MarketWatch: This site is a great starting point for more quantifiable information about your target industry. Is it trending up or down, growing or shrinking? Check it out at www.marketwatch.com/industries and click on the Industry Analyzer link (below the Industries header) to see the market index for the sector you're trying to get a job in.

Skoll World Forum: Skoll World Forum (http://skollworldforum.org) is a great site for following trends in the nonprofit world with expert authors on various topics, such as philanthropy, business models, social entrepreneurship, and so on. Type the topic you're interested in into the search box at the top of the home page.

Getting news delivered to you with RSS feeds

Really Simple Syndication (or RSS) feeds are a way of pulling the news from multiple websites into a single feed reader (the application that displays your feeds). RSS feeds allow you to read all your news sites in one spot. Essentially, instead of exploring different sites for the news, the news comes to you.

Many news websites and blogs have an RSS link, which looks like the symbol in Figure 16-1. Clicking on this link connects your feed reader with the feed so that it displays the latest posts as they’re published. After you start accumulating tens to hundreds of valuable news sources, having a single place to read them all can be a huge timesaver.

Figure 16-1: The RSS symbol lets you know you can subscribe to a site.

Before you can put RSS feeds to work, you have to decide which RSS reader you want to use. Feedly is my personal favorite RSS reader because it transforms your feeds into a beautiful magazine interface, as you can see in Figure 16-2. You can view highlights on an automatically generated cover page and view and share full articles easily. Feedly is also very easy to configure. To access it, go to www.feedly.com. Note that it's compatible only with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari browsers.

Figure 16-2: Feedly’s cover page

After you choose the feed reader you want to use, build your subscriptions by using the resources for valuable news sites on your industry covered in the preceding section. Then follow these steps to add the subscriptions to your feed reader:

1. Click the RSS link in either the address bar of your browser or on the web page itself.

The RSS link appears differently from page to page. Sometimes it simply says RSS; other times it has some fancy variation of the icon.

2. Designate which reader you want to use to view the feed.

If you aren’t using Feedly, then you’ll be prompted to choose your reader from a drop-down list. Simply pick the one you want to use.

3. Add the feed to the appropriate folder or category.

In Feedly, you can assign categories to your feeds. Doing so helps you navigate your feeds when you accumulate many news sources. If you’re using Feedly, set up your categories so when you subscribe to a site, you just have to pick the proper category. If you aren’t using Feedly, put the new feed in some kind of folder for easy retrieval later.

If you’re on a mobile device, check out a news reader app called Flipboard. Flipboard presents news and information in an attractive, magazine-like format. Head on over to your app store and search for it. It’s one of the most popular apps.

Joining industry groups on LinkedIn for news

If you’ve already joined the LinkedIn Groups that your targeted hiring managers belong to, as I show you how to do in Chapter 15, then you’re probably aware of how being part of such industry groups helps you stay informed of topics your targeted hiring managers are concerned with.

Another way to find industry-related LinkedIn Groups worth joining is to do a group search. Simply click on Groups from the drop-down menu next to the search bar and type in your industry or field. When the results pop up, focus on active groups, which usually have more than 150 members. (Typically, the largest groups appear at the top of a search-results list; they’re the ones worth joining.)

Every industry has a professional organization and typically these professional organizations have LinkedIn Groups. Type in the abbreviation or whole name of some professional organizations in your target industry and join their groups.

The trick with using LinkedIn Groups for industry trends is to look for patterns and levels of interest. Patterns are similar topics between two or more groups. For example, you may see wind-turbine real estate issues coming up in several green energy groups. Chances are something is going on there. Also the group’s page lets you see the most popular topics. Make note of these popular topics because they’re most likely on people’s minds.

Fellow members of professional groups on LinkedIn are often eager to help. I’ve seen people post requests for advice about starting in a certain field and receive more than 50 replies from good Samaritans. So don’t be afraid to leverage these groups to learn as much as you can.

Mining Twitter for real-time feedback on industry issues

Because Twitter offers a real-time look at the popular topics and issues, you can use it to uncover current industry trends. Use the following techniques to get started (for additional tips on using Twitter to further your job search, see Chapter 12):

Find industry-specific conferences. Conferences usually have a hashtag (a way of tagging tweets around a similar topic) associated with them. If the conference had a session that resonated with many people, then you should know about it. Use http://search.twitter.com/advanced or www.hashtags.org and type in the name of the conference. You may have to change the dates of your search to match when the event happened.

Search for trends on WhatTheTrend. Go to http://whatthetrend.com and type in your industry in the top search box to see what people are saying.

Find out where the trends are happening with Trendsmap. This tool allows you to search topics based on geography. It shows you a huge map of tweets coming from different locations so you can figure out what's going on in your area (or in the area you're hoping to move to). Check it out at www.trendsmap.com.

Following Companies through Their Social Networking Sites

Although seeing a broad view of the industry is a great start, sooner or later you need to understand the needs of a specific company and a specific person in that company. Sure, you can read annual reports and browse the About Us sections of your target companies’ websites, but both of those options have their downsides: An annual report takes months of production to get published, and corporate websites can take weeks to get updated, which means the info you have on that company may already be outdated.

The best places for real-time information about a company are its social media sites because news appears instantly on these sites. Start looking for your target companies on the following social media outlets:

Follow companies on LinkedIn: Following a company means that you’re alerted anytime anything changes about that company on LinkedIn. If someone was fired, newly hired, or promoted, you’ll know. If the company has new products or made a status update, you’ll know. Make sure you’re following all your target companies and checking their updates weekly.

To follow a company on LinkedIn, find the company’s profile page and click on the yellow Follow button at the top-right corner of the page.

Read the blogosphere: These days, most organizations have a blog. Corporate blogs can vary in the type of articles they publish: Sometimes they’re thought leaders, other times they’re self-promoting. Either way, a corporate blog can give you important insights about an organization’s strategic initiatives and market positioning. Either subscribe to the blogs of your target companies or visit them on a weekly basis.

When reading the blog of a target company, feel free to comment on or tweet an article. Companies find running a successful blog difficult and often hire consultants to help get more traffic to it. Help them out by leaving the first comment, which can help inspire more comments. Also, tweeting a link to your followers can help drive more traffic to a company’s blog. At the very least, the person in charge of social media will be grateful to you. Later, you can call in that favor to get an introduction to a hiring manager.

Monitor Twitter: Make sure you’re following your target company’s Twitter account. Even if you have little interest in tweeting and doing other Twitter things, watching your target company’s Twitter posts can be insightful. Drop your target company into a private Twitter List so you can read all its updates at once without getting distracted. (A Twitter list is a folder you can create to put your contacts in; I explain how to create one in Chapter 12.) Pay close attention to topics the company repeats, articles it links to, and people it retweets. All these activities are clues to what’s important to the company right now.

Drawing Conclusions about a Company’s Needs and Your Fit

After you have a clear picture of industry trends and what’s going on with your target company, turn that research into a clear list of issues you think said company’s hiring manager cares about and how you can help address them. (If you still need to target the right hiring manager, see Chapter 15.) I recommend creating a chart like the one in Table 16-1.

The first three columns are pretty self-explanatory. Here’s a breakdown of what to put in the next several columns:

Similarities: Jot down anything you find out about the hiring manager, either from LinkedIn or Twitter, that aligns with your own interests or experiences. Mentioning friends and schools in common is a great start for when you reach out.

Goals/Initiatives: As you read industry blogs and company tweets and look at recent hires in the organization, you get a sense of a company’s strategic direction (what it’s trying to achieve in the market this year). Take a guess at what you think this hiring manager is trying to accomplish. It may be raising funds from investors, cutting operations expenditures, or filling a recent vacancy.

Problems (Business & Personal): Note the top three issues that this hiring manager is likely struggling to overcome based on your industry and company research.

How You Can Help: Just knowing and then naming a company’s problems isn’t enough. You need to offer to help solve them. Think about your skill set. Which of the company’s problems do you think you can address? List any specific skills or experiences you have that specifically address the problems.

After you call out these skills in this table, refer back to them when customizing your cover letter or résumé. These skills or experiences should form the foundation of the main points you try to communicate in your application. You also need these points in Chapter 18 when I show you how to reach out to hiring managers through social media.