Lucy Rider shares her top tips on how to find out the reality of what it’s like to work for a prospective employer
The Challenge: You are considering a number of potential roles, but you really want to make sure the culture of the organisation aligns with your preferences.
The Solution: Do your research!
Company websites these days will look impressive, but often they can lack some authenticity.
Here are some things you can do to complete accurate due diligence before accepting a role.
Ask to meet the team – With the surge in video interviewing, it is both easier and harder to get a feel for the authentic culture of an organisation, you may meet more people from far-flung locations in the organisation during the interview process, but also it’s all a bit more 2 dimensional. Ask to go into their offices and spend a bit of time chatting with prospective colleagues if you can.
Take a look on Glassdoor – this is a good place to see employee reviews as well as ex-employee reviews. Like anything review-based these days, it’s worth taking with a pinch of salt and appreciating that the extreme ones might be exaggerating. Smaller companies may be perfectly fine to work for and may by nature not have loads of reviews, and likewise, large global businesses might have very different cultures around the world.
Ask lots of questions at interview – I saw a great example of a question you could ask last week posted by Mark Hopkins (important to credit people and not just steal their LinkedIn content!)
“What do people do during their lunch break?”
This gives you insight into whether people feel obliged to shove a sandwich down while sitting at their desks, whether they can’t wait to get away from their colleagues and eat lunch in their car, or whether there is a more social element and people spend time going for a walk or run or have a weekly lunch club.
Lucy Rider
Senior Director
