Job hunting cheat sheet

In my previous post, I referred to a 1-2 page cheat sheet that I used to create for each company (say Company X) to which I had applied. Here are the key things that I used to have in the cheat sheet.

1) Market space – what industry is Company X in? What is the market growth?

2) Product line – what is Company X’s product line? What problems are they solving? Do you believe that these problems exist (remember the dot come era where companies created businesses to sell vitamins on the web?)

3) Competitors – who are the company’s competitors? Is the segment fragmented with many competitors or has the consolidation already happened and the competition is well established? Where does Company X stand?

4) Management team – Who is the management team and what is their track record? Have they done this before or what are their past successes?

5) Company info – how long has the company been in business. What is the current sales? Public or private – who are the investors and how much funding have they put in and how many rounds?

6) Position description – I copy and paste the job description and then highlight the sentences which call out the skills that are my strengths – this highlighting helps me to hit upon each of these strengths during the phone interview – the job calls for this, let me tell you about what I have done in this area ….

etc.

Here is a Cheat sheet sample that I had created for one of the companies that I was looking at – Mall Networks. I did get the phone interview, but did not hear back from them since (even though I did follow up :-))