When going to an interview know e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g about the company you’re interviewing with:

• How is the company doing [financially/product-wise/reputation-wise?
• Check its performance on Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance, and Tech Radar. Most important: do a search for it on google.com.
• What other positions are open, at what locations, and for how long?
• Familiarize yourself with the company’s history on Wikipedia.
• Carefully read the company’s reviews on Glassdoor.
• Inspect the company’s LinkedIn activity and try to reach conclusions based on their posts.
• Read the company’s reviews on its Facebook business page and Google Maps (yes, oftentimes people leave positive/negative reviews there for the company at their building’s location).
• [best] See if there’re any interviews with the company’s CEO/other management/company employees on YouTube. Watch the company’s promotional videos.
• Read what people have to say about the company in the Israeli media – the Marker, Geektime and Calcalist.

Who are the companies this company’s competing with?

• If it’s a simple software product you can go to alternativeto.net and enter the product’s name. The site will show you all the products that perform the same function.
• If it’s more complex industry/product: Find industry analyst firms that cover the company and look for comparative research like Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant” for Forrester’s “Wave” for the IT industry. This kind of report is designed to give prospective buyers an overview of a segment and rank the various players. These reports are possible to find for free as reprints are made available online. This may not be an option for more obscure industries.

When applying for a position:

• First check whether you know anyone at the company via your networks or extended networks who can forward the resume on your behalf. If you have a recruiter you’re friendly with, ask them whether they know anyone who can refer you. Only once you’ve exhausted those routes apply on your own.
• [most important] Take the job description and match it on-to-one to your resume. Literally take lines from the job description look at them ‘questions’ to which you provide ‘answers’ inside your CV.
• Quadruple, quintuple, sextuple check your resume to make sure there aren’t any grammatical error, typos, formatting errors. The resume is a mirror image of how detail-oriented you are!

When doing Zoom interviews:

• Make sure you have a lot of light in the room. Best: to have a light from behind the camera pointed at your face directly as they do in professional filming settings.
• Make sure you have a high-end web camera so that you look shiny and new. This is very important. Oftentimes laptop built-in webcams have atrocious quality. It is worth investing in something like Logitech Brio 4K camera if you’re very serious about your appearance on the screen. See tips on how to make yourself look better in video-conferences in this great article.
• Do not sit with a window behind you, it’ll blind the viewer on the other side.
• Hide the Zoom window form the screen so that there’s no self-view and you aren’t seeing the interviewer either. This’ll help you concentrate on your answers.
• Overdress.

Eli Solo, Gvahim Alumnus, professional services engineer and contributing author