Research prospective workplaces

What's the best way to knock the socks off your interviewer? Sam Richter and Jill Johnson believe a great first step is to know something about the place where you hope to work.
Johnson, owner of Johnson Consulting Services in Minneapolis, is a longtime board member at the James J. Hill Reference Library in St. Paul, Minn. She was on the search committee two years ago when the library needed a new president.
Enter Richter, then a marketing whiz at Digital River in Minneapolis. A 30-something nonlibrarian who had spent his entire career in marketing and advertising, he seemed an unlikely candidate to lead a stately, 80-year-old reference library into the 21st century.
In fact, applying for the position wasn't his idea. A creative recruiter, who saw the link between marketing, technology and the library's goals for the future, gave Richter the heads-up on the opening. But once he decided to go for it, Richter dug in.
The hiring process was a long one, on both sides. Johnson remembers that the search committee spent several meetings identifying their criteria for the position before reviewing the r & eacute;sum & eacute;s brought to them by the recruiter. They selected five candidates and interviewed each one twice. The final two candidates were interviewed again, given a full day of psychological testing, run through a background check and asked to solve the problems presented in two case studies.
Richter prevailed and started his tenure as president of the library in the late summer of 2001, a little more than four months after submitting his r & eacute;sum & eacute; to the recruiter.
The distinction
What made Richter stand out? After all, he had never held a CEO position before and had never worked in a library or any nonprofit organization, for that matter.
According to Johnson, it was a matter of sheer enthusiasm, demonstrated by Richter in the strategic questions he asked the committee and the research he did before his interviews.
To Richter, the research was a matter of common sense: He wanted to learn if the Hill was the kind of organization he would want to represent.
"Of course, I went to the Web site and dug up anything I could," he said. "One of the questions I was told to prepare for after the first round of interviews had to do with James J. Hill history. So I picked up the phone and asked if someone could sit down and talk to me about James J. Hill. I had a 45-minute conversation with one of the reference librarians. In the interview I spat this back, and Jill Johnson said, 'How did you know all this stuff?' And I said, 'Well, I called.' They were just blown away by that."
Calling the library directly to ask for help preparing for an interview to run the library is either genius or simple naivet & eacute;. Whichever it is, it's not common.
Key strategy
After 18 months in the position, Richter is convinced that job candidates do themselves a terrible disservice by not preparing more fully for interviews. In most cases, he said, a series of short phone calls or a strategic analysis of an organization's Web site would provide enough information to make a candidate shine.
But don't waste the interviewer's time with softball questions.
As Richter notes, "A candidate probably thinks they're doing a good job when they ask, 'Sam, what is your vision for the library?' And I'm thinking, cripes, if you had spent four minutes on the Web site, you would know it's there. A better question would be, 'I see you're reaching out to the rural communities. How is this going?' What having information allows you to do is to ask confident questions."
To get that information, Richter recommends that candidates research the company, the individual running the interview and the industry, including other companies. To start, find out about key trends, the innovations in the field and the predictions being made by analysts.
And where should you go to do that? Richter's ready for that question. Start your search with the James J. Hill Reference Library, which Richter calls "the only nonprofit, private, publicly accessible library in the country," he said.
To start your search, go to the library's Web site at www.jjhill.org or call them at (651) 265-5500.
XAmy Lindgren, the owner of a career-consulting firm in St. Paul, Minn., can be reached at alindgren@pioneerpress.com.