A friend of mine will interview for a job next week. She asked me how I usually prepare for interviews and I told her that I typically do a lot of research – less about the position and more about the company.

I am not alone in thinking this is a good idea. Richard Bolles, in his popular What Color Is Your Parachute, has a chapter called “Fifteen Tips About Your Job Interview,” and a section of this is simply called Do Your Homework. What’s the homework? Here’s what Bolles says:

Every interview should be prepared for, before you go in. Naturally, you want to go into the interview(s) with this employer curious to know more about you, but the employer is first of all curious about what you know about them. Do a lot of research on them before you go in. Why? Because organizations love to be loved. If you’ve gone to the trouble of finding out as much as you can about them before you interview with them, they will be flattered and impressed, believe me.

So exactly what kind of research is he talking about? He says further:

Find out everything you can about them. Google them. Go to their website, if they have one, and read all their press releases, plus everything there that is hidden under the heading “About Us.” If this organization is local, and your town has a public library, ask your local librarian for help in finding any news clippings or other information about the place. And finally, ask all your friends if they know anyone who ever worked there or works there still, so you can take them to lunch or tea or Starbucks and find out any inside stories before you approach the place. (And, of course, maybe after you hear these stories you’ll decide not to explore them any further. Better to know that now than later.) (ibid.)

Although it is perhaps a fairly cheap point – hence the hedging, I suppose – Bolles even suggests that it “may” make the difference “between your being hired or not being hired” (ibid.).¹

Notice that ChatGPT is absent from the list of sources that Bolles suggests people should use for research. Perhaps this is because I have an older issue, perhaps it features in the latest issue. Bolles, now deceased, used to update the book every year.

In any case, and this is ultimately what I want to get across, ChatGPT has made this much, much easier. It can even make a report in .pdf with not only the resources but also insights extracted from those.

I used the following prompt:

I'll interview for a position at GetYourGuide next week. I would like to prepare well. Can you help me find any press related to GetYourGuide from the last 1-2 years?

And it created this product:

It’s not so surprising that ChatGPT can be a valuable aid when it comes to finding information, but sometimes a good product becomes great thanks to smaller, often overlooked features. The ability to generate a clean, nicely formatted, and ready-to-print report isn’t just convenient; it transforms scattered research into something polished and presentation-ready. We didn’t just save extracting insights but ended up with a document that was easy to review, annotate, and share. These thoughtful details in how information is presented may fly under the radar, but they’re exactly what elevate the experience from helpful to exceptional.

“The details are not the details. They make the design.”
— Charles Eames