0:10 good afternoon and welcome to the way to wow people making money i'm your host kevin bemel and thank you very much for joining me this afternoon uh last week we started talking about the idea that money isn't the only thing that drives job satisfaction indeed the culture of the organization in which you work has a huge impact on how much you'll enjoy your job excuse me my second my glasses are for anyone who wears glasses you know what i'm talking about there's a
0:45 a weird spot in the middle of my glasses um i'm sorry about that little little digression so um uh cor organizational culture has a tremendous impact on how much we enjoy our work and so we talked about seven aspects of organizational culture that impact job satisfaction happiness at work etc and uh if you're interested in those i invite you to go to our youtube channel the way to wow show on youtube
1:21 and you can watch that episode there you can also watch lots of other episodes of course shameless plug uh and you can subscribe even more shameless plug right uh have it but uh in any event uh today we're gonna talk about how you figure out what an organization's culture is so often times what we know about an organization we we know through advertising so um i'll take an example that leaps to mind state farm insurance company right
1:56 um when i was much younger they had a very famous jingle that was written by barry manilow like a good neighbor state farm is there right who doesn't want to work at a company that's like a good neighbor right and and i you know to this day uh i you know think of state farm as being a a a great place to work and of course now there's the i think it's jake at state farm commercials and jake seems like such a nice guy i mean i'm sure he is right um you know does everyone who works for
2:31 state farm are they like jake i i don't know but it presents right a picture of a company that's a very pleasant company to do business with and and probably a pleasant company to work at as well is that actually the case do the people who work at state farm think of it as you know a wonderful place to work honestly i have no idea um i do have a friend who unfort you know disparages state farm but he works for a competitor so i guess you know that that that would explain at least part of it in in any event we don't want to
3:06 choose or or analyze an organization's culture based on commercials or you know past childhood references or whatever we want to assess it based on information that you know from a credible source and also based on impressions from people who are actually working there as opposed to people who maybe do business with the company it's entirely possible um look i'll i'll take um pardon me another example from my youth
3:42 um i worked at disneyland for for several years and i can assure you the experience of going to disneyland was much better than the experience of working there there was a lot of employee dissatisfaction at disneyland and of course like all large employers not all of it was justified uh but but some of it certainly was there were some really awful supervisors who worked there when i was working there um you know some of the work conditions
4:18 could be really unpleasant um and uh and and so you know the experience of being a customer of disneyland was very very different than being an employee there so uh and of course i i worked there because i loved to go there right that was my motivation and and you know that that was a very uh important early lesson in in my work life if not my professional life i i was never a disney uh professional so i'm gonna uh bring up my uh book again and we're gonna talk about how do you
4:54 get uh intelligence is is the word we use you know in the military information on uh organizational culture i'm gonna move this over so i'm more likely to be you know looking looking at you so and and again this is this is my book the eight deadly sins of job hunting um this happens to be targeted specifically to veterans although if you're not a veteran i think you will still find it uh very very useful and just like last week if you uh would like a pdf copy of the book
5:30 just use the email address that will be in the show notes after this episode posts on um on youtube and i will be happy to send you a link to my google drive where you can download a pdf copy of the book uh i was just talking to someone about it earlier today and i was telling her it is a step-by-step task by task process for finding the job that you want so it takes uh the guest work if you will out of out of your job hunt you know what do i do today what do i do later
6:06 today what do i do the end of today what do i do tomorrow etc you never have to worry about that you can start at the beginning go straight through and you don't even necessarily have to know what job you want it will help you figure that out as well as well as figuring out what you're qualified for you know what is a viable job in in the marketplace today etc so it's it's a very comprehensive guide you can use it that way and you can also use it just uh to back to uh enhance your ability in a particular
6:41 area of job searching like like finding out organizational culture preferably at least in part before you take your time to you know interview with a company and go through a whole long thing um get to know it a ahead of time and and that could be useful so and we're gonna have to move this down here okay so we're gonna go to page i believe it's 126. he said there we go all right there you go okay so um you know so gathering cultural intel
7:17 right and a nice military jargon term to start um and and you know you see that that that cool airplane there that's uh that's an e2 um those are flown by the navy to do command and control work you'll notice they're a prop driven aircraft which wait wait prop driven today's day uh yes because they launch from the carrier and they just kind of hang up hang out above the carrier and um and and because they're up high they have a much lar larger horizon that they can gather uh
7:52 intelligence from than you can from the ship itself which is you know which is much lower down and it hits the limits of the horizon much more quickly so so you've got a you know a pilot and a co-pilot up here front and then you have a bunch of naval flight officers here and here in the back uh gathering data and and transmitting it to the ship and to the other aircraft in the air wing et cetera et cetera so um you know one of the uh i think most underrated traits that we can develop
8:28 just for life in general is curiosity now you know i i think in some ways our culture kind of beats it out of us not literally of course but as kids it seems like we're pretty naturally curious about the life about the world around us about life about i don't know all kinds of things i know when i was a kid i was always looking into this looking at that and i see it with my my daughter as well she's it's one of the things she loves about youtube is there's videos on virtually anything that she wants to know about
9:04 that trait if we've lost it is really something we need to kindle anew because the the uh function of being curious wanting to know about things will make a lot of the process of job hunting much easier it can be incredibly boring doing some of this research work so you know if you can turn it into something like a game that will make it more fun so you know when i say sleuthing you know i kind of
9:40 have this picture of uh someone with a you know a cloak on and a sherlock holmes hat right in there and a magnifying glass and they're going and you know finding out information about about a company i think that's the kind of that's the kind of curiosity if we can build that in ourselves will be very very useful to this process as well as a lot of like i said a lot of other things in our life building our relationships etc so if if you have two qualities one i mentioned curiosity and the other impartiality you will have a significant advantage
10:17 as you look to figure out the or the culture of a particular organization that you may be interested in so why impartiality well because sometimes you'll find things out about a company they may not seem very good okay if we can look at them in a somewhat impartial way and just dig beyond what may be a surface impression we may find that whatever that aspect of the culture is that doesn't look so good isn't really what we thought it was so rather than
10:53 just assuming something about a company if if we can just as impartially as possible investigate it and uh um and and and sort of you know keep digging we will be you know much much better off so so i just wanted to mention those two things that are kind of you know the mindset of doing research okay so i talk about your toc your target organization culture that's you know you're you're interested in i don't stay farm we always talk about that a minute ago how are you gonna that's your target
11:29 organization what is their organizational culture so there are several ways of digging up information and i'm sure it comes as no surprise that one of the most efficient is to do your research online there's a tremendous amount of information online as you know and there's a tremendous amount of information about companies online some of which they put there others other sources are gathered by aggregators of data and they can be useful because i'm sure you can appreciate if you're
12:05 looking at a company's website you're they're probably not saying it's a it's a real bummer working here you know they're not gonna do that they're gonna present their you know their best public face that they possibly can and so we're gonna need more than one uh you know source of information in order to get an accurate picture of a company and i want to i want to point out another word here you know a healthy dose of skepticism is is a good thing keep keep digging don't accept just the the at face value what you find good or bad by the way
12:42 okay um sometimes people will be you know someone will be mad at a company and they'll get a bunch of people together to just slam the company and and in reality it's just one unhappy person one customer who had a bad experience and now they're just you know excoriating the company when indeed the company is is you know both you know very good to its customers and very good to its employees or by the way i hasten to add um if a customer had a bad experience um it may be because the company has
13:18 takes the position that the customer is not always right you know sometimes we have to back up our employees even in in the face of a customer complaint because in our judgment the customer complaint is unreasonable so i don't know about you i would much rather work for a company that takes that position right i i know it's very very popular to say the customer is always right it was a a trend for a number of decades and it may still be a trend in certain segments of the business world um i don't i don't
13:55 buy that the customer is not always right and one of the most important lessons i ever learned in business was the client is not always right sometimes people are just overly demanding they are rude they are nasty and um you know if if uh if someone came up to one of my uh people and and started yelling and screaming at them even if they had a legitimate problem the yelling and screaming is not called for and if if the person will not calm down
14:32 and and reign in their behavior um i'm most likely going to back up my employee or the person i'm working with not most likely i'm going to um and then if i find out subsequent to that okay so the the you know the person i'm working with did something very provocative that set the other person off okay so we'll have to work out that situation but assuming that the person was was handling things as well as they could in in in the you know onslaught of this uh customers or clients you know emotional uh you know uh tantrum
15:08 i'm backing up my the person i'm working with because because i i i don't want to do business with people who who treat other people badly i i i don't want to do that i i i do my best not to do that when i'm in a place of business and i don't want people doing it to the people i'm working with so i i think you know just because a company has some some bad customer ratings that isn't necessarily a sign of of bad culture um it could conversely being be a sign of good culture so that's why i say you know be be skeptical about some of the stuff you
15:44 you you read or research and really you know dig into the facts okay so that being said oh and look there it says that being said so one of the first places to go to is an organization's uh website um you know you're going to get some basic information there what is its mission what are its values what are the biographies of the the top executives you may even find an organizational chart you'll find promotional and marketing materials and the public face that the company puts on
16:19 okay it may not jive with who you are or what you value okay so uh and and and and that's fine um i could come up i don't want to i don't want to get into politics but i could come up with some examples of you know what's going on currently where there are certain companies that have a particular view politically and it's going to be on there it's on their website right and if you go there and that does not comport with your values so i think right then and there you're done
16:54 don't go to work for that company it's it's not going to be a good fit you're going to be uncomfortable there and and rather than you know going through a a a bad situation just hey look they're saying up front this is who we are you know good good for them to to be honest um and there's and and to a certain extent there's a self-selection process that goes on there so i i think you know take take those things pretty much at face value now you know when it comes to mission statement statements of value of values
17:30 so read those and and see do are those things i want to be involved in are those values that i share okay now in this case one of the things you want to check is are they acting consistent with that mission so you know if if if a company is professing to have a mission to save the planet um and yet uh you know they're responsible for you know deforesting millions of acres of the rain forest in brazil so uh you know you could i think you would you would agree that their their
18:07 mission they're not really acting in accordance with their mission okay and and that brings up two things one is if if that mission is something that resonates with you and they're not working really toward that mission so that's a problem and the second is the hypocrisy right they're saying this is our mission and yet they're acting completely counter to the mission right so there's two issues there and in some ways i would say the hypocrisy is probably the worst of the two i'm not saying i'm not saying deforestation is a good thing i mean in terms of company culture um that that they want to try
18:44 and fool us into thinking they're they have a certain mission when indeed they're acting the opposite that that's to me again that that would be a a a deal killer so to speak so so you can you can look up on their website um you you also should be able to find information that they have if well if it's a publicly traded company i should say you will be able to find information that they have to submit periodically to the securities and exchange commission and it'll tell you more information about what what the the c-suite structure is
19:20 the executive structure of the company it'll tell you about the different divisions of the company where it's operating it'll hide it may highlight projects in which they're involved it may highlight the countries in which the company is involved if it's a multinational company so you can find all of that information and typically it'll be on the company's website now um when you're looking for their um different sec filings you you in fact may click on something and it'll take you to another website you know through a hyperlink you know that that's fine i mean just know that they may not store that
19:56 literally on their website because they can do it through hyperlinks okay so so that's a that's a good place to start the next place i would recommend you go is to their uh social media uh you know um what's word i'm like social media presence okay most companies today above and beyond their website have a social media presence of some kind especially if they're a larger company they pretty much have to at this point so the first place to check is linkedin
20:32 okay linkedin is the social media site for you know career and business matters okay and and first of all the the company or the organization may have a linkedin page just for the organization that was apart from any individual right linkedin started out like all the other social media sites you went and you created your linkedin profile and you could interact with other people but then eventually they created pages um so for example i have a linkedin page for the way to wow show
21:07 um i think it'll link to my profile my personal profile but but the page is separate for the way to wow show so again you will find information there about the company oftentimes they will have videos they will have um uh articles that they you know people in the organization have written you'll get an idea of who may be following them that can be useful and you'll also be able to see some of the people who are associated with the organization
21:42 and that's very valuable because you can reach out to those people at some point to talk to them about the company okay especially if it's before you've applied there this is something i recommend you do for for a number of reasons one is to get more information about the organization's culture two is to develop relationships with people who are already there so that if you do decide at some point you want to apply for a job there you'll be able to do so through an insider as
22:18 opposed to just you know applying through a job board or applying blindly the vast majority of jobs and the higher level the job the more likely this is to be the case the vast majority of jobs are given to people who have a connection to someone already at the company people who are applying from outside the company with with no one on the inside kind of running interference for them are extremely unlikely to get a position in that company that's that's just the way it is statistically
22:54 you can say well that's horrible or they're overlooking great talent that both of those may be the case here in the reality of the real world that that's how it works okay and i i don't know what will necessarily change that because when a company is is looking for good people one of the things they do is is you know people in the company know this position is open they're looking for people to fill in if they know a friend that they like that that fits that position they want to work with their friend wouldn't you want to work with your friends right i was just talking again talking to somebody earlier today a
23:30 friend of mine he's looking to fill a particular position in his company and i said hey let me introduce you to someone i know who knows a lot of people in that industry and you know maybe he can help you out so instead of having to you know sort of fly blind or fly by the city of your pants they used to say um and that that's a colorful expression i'm not sure where it comes from anyway he can get a referral from you know a a very close friend of a friend of his kind of thing right um you know that's that's the way that's the way it goes now um you will get
24:05 uh more information well better searching ability if you buy a linkedin premium membership now they are kind of expensive okay i had one for a few years because they give free memberships to veterans for it's i think it used to be five years i mean it may only be three years now i don't remember exactly um but it was very very useful like i said it is kind of expensive and typically it's bought by by recruiters and and people who are looking to hire a lot of people so it may not really be worth your while to get
24:41 that you know premium membership in linkedin in order to get the more sophisticated searching ability having said that the the basic searching ability is is is pretty good and you should be able to find a lot of what you need in terms of gathering intelligence about an organization's culture so again start on linkedin find out if the organization has a page find out if they have some kind of linkedin group that they sponsor look up people look at the profiles of people who are currently working for the
25:16 organization and also if you can look up the profiles of people who no longer work for the organization but did it one time and if you can connect with those people and say hey why did you leave well i got a better job so i moved on okay well that was fine okay or are you kidding i hated it there oh why did you hate it there oh i mean it was the worst organizational culture i've ever experienced oh really wow that's horrible wha what was what made it so bad okay don't just take people's assessments
25:53 for you know their experiences that's not to say that their experiences aren't true for them but what may be a horrible environment for them may be you know no big deal for you okay so you know we're not all the same and so you know we we uh we need to dig again dig deeper look below the surface be somewhat impartial as you do this kind of research okay and then the next thing uh you know there's other social media sites facebook twitter um you know
26:29 facebook is not a a a a great place especially for a large company i mean they have a presence i i you know probably you're going to find better information on linkedin but there may be some good information on facebook it's worth spending at least a few minutes seeing if anything's there twitter is a place to go um first of all to see if there is a company feed to see what kind of things they're tweeting and second to see if any of the especially the senior people in the company are on twitter and tweeting things because that will give
27:04 you insight into who they are so i mean look i think it's no surprise that that twitter can be somewhat of a cesspool when it comes to uh the things that people say and and and the sort of attacks and all of that kind of thing um having said that um if you've got i don't know the ceo of a company and and they're you know being particularly provocative or attacking of a on a certain issue or something and and and that's and and and that makes you uncomfortable you know
27:39 look here's the here's this is the reality of of human beings right if we're in a you know organization with you know a hierarchy one of the things people do to move up the hierarchy is they sort of go along with what the higher ups say and think even if they don't believe it themselves so if if the you know head person is uh saying and behaving in a certain way a lot of times people lower down will do the same thing even if they personally don't like it because that's how they see their ability to get promoted is
28:15 so you're likely to be subject to that and do you want to play that game and do you want to be subject to the you know the behavior or the ideas or whatever that's a decision i think you know you need to make now if you have a thick skin and it's you know in the end it's not really that important you just find it you know annoying or whatever okay so that's your choice i'm not saying that if someone expresses an opinion different than yours that therefore you should rule them out as a company what i'm saying is know what you may be facing at that company so that you can make an informed
28:52 decision about the culture that you will be in if you go to work there right and twitter can give you uh you know some some insight into that because it is such a uh freewheeling kind of uh platform okay and then i mentioned groups um you know there are thousands and thousands of groups on both linkedin and and facebook these days and there may be a group for that company now the group itself may be closed you may not be able to get into the group and maybe only be four employees of an organization
29:28 that just may be the thing but you may be able to find out if someone is in the group that you know or something like that so that's another uh you know thing to look at okay let's go on to the next one all right employee review sites so i mentioned before you're going to want to go to some outside sources of information and employee review sites are a good place to do that because they are specifically set up to allow people who work at an
30:03 organization to talk about what it's like to do so okay and you see some of the names of them here um career bliss career community glassdoor the muse vault wet feet um now to be honest with you um i i don't know that all of these are are still around i know glassdoor is i believe vault is as well uh in any event all you need to do is google employee review sites or do a do a you know a search for them and you'll find out which are the most active these days and you know search the organization it's
30:39 not only for-profit companies that are on these sites nonprofits are on it too uh to be honest with you i'm not sure if government agencies are on it they may be in any event check out the reviews okay now just know that most of the people who take the time to post about an organization on one of these sites is doing so because they're disgruntled so you're rarely going to find uh posts that say this is the greatest company to work for i love it
31:14 here you know you have to come work here you're not you're probably not going to see that and if you do i would be a little bit skeptical about that it may be that the company went to their people and said hey we got all these terrible reviews on glassdoor can some of you go on there at least you know say something nice about us because gosh i didn't think we were you know the attila the hunt of our industry or whatever um and that's not to say that a good review is necessarily suspect uh only to say that uh you know you have to kind of look at the overall picture right so that's why you want to
31:49 use multiple sources so um one of the things to look at too is how long has the person who's made the comments about the company been at the company are they brand new and if they're brand new and saying really great things are they kind of in their you know honeymoon phase so to speak have they been there a long time and they're really invested in the company and have they recently been fired and and if so generally i don't think it'll say this but you know keep in mind were they
32:24 fired for cause were they laid off you know what was the what was the nature of the of what was the reason that they left the company if someone is fired especially fired for cause and they feel that that that they were treated unjustly i'm sure you can imagine they they can have very very negative feelings about the company makes perfect sense doesn't mean though that the company deserves the criticism it may have been that this person was behaving badly or or you know doing wrong things or whatever and
32:59 the company in order to improve the atmosphere for other employees fired this person right so so again be a little be some somewhat skeptical keep an open mind and be impartial as you gather this data and let it just kind of sift through your mind until it seems that after you've got a lot of data it seems to be coalescing around certain ideas okay so those are the employee review sites now uh you can also check news sites um you know if if you've got a particular
33:35 uh organization that you that you're interested in i would encourage you to go to google google google google news alerts and you will get an email uh anytime that uh well i shouldn't say any time because i don't think that's the case but most of the time that that organization shows up uh at least somewhat prominently on the internet and then you can click through and see what what that particular piece is saying about the company but you can also just search any any whatever your favorite news aggregator is again do a search of news aggregator if you don't have one
34:11 that you use all the time anyway and then once you're there search the name of the organization that you're interested in and you know see what comes up right so like if you were interested in nasa i would imagine right now the kind of things coming up or are like the artemis program right that's the program to take people back to the moon um and um you know uh i'm not sure what else are that's the big program at nasa right now i think um some of the stuff with spacex i think is still you know somewhat timely so you're probably seeing you know stuff about
34:46 that if you were to look at the news on on nasa etc um and and uh so again another way just to get an idea of what is the company involved with how newsworthy is it you know if you don't find any news about a company it doesn't mean anything other than a they may not seek that kind of publicity b they're just a you know their company that they're not you know lighting fires anywhere so to speak they're doing good work but it's just not anything that you know they're making a a big deal about okay
35:21 all right so that's again new sense next financial information sites okay so like yahoo finance is is is one of them these are when i mentioned before about looking up financial uh information on an organization's website and if it's a publicly traded company and you can you might click on a link to what's called its 10k this is a filing that companies have to make periodically publicly traded companies have to make periodically okay so sometimes what will happen is they'll
35:56 actually hyperlink you to one of these financial information sites rather than uploading all that information to their own website okay and and what you will find in these sites is generally a a brief financial profile how large the company is in terms of employees revenue where it's located what its primary lines of business are whether it's publicly traded and if so you know you'll you'll have access to its filings which have to be uh publicly accessible uh you know top executives oftentimes
36:31 are briefly profiled there that that's the kind of thing you will find it'll give you a a quick summary of a company it may also have some links there uh like you you might start if you start there you'll have a link typically to the the organization's website uh and and it may have links to other things relevant to that particular company maybe new news articles of recent developments impacting the company so you can look up all that on financial information sites and again just search financial information sites
37:06 uh and well here's here's some of them uh cnbc cnn money financial times um and and you can get a full business profile on financial times okay google finance the street so the sec's electric data gathering analysis and retrieval site edgar right yeah everything in the government has to have some kind of acronym so edgar has all the 10k filings the annual reports the 10 qs the quarterly reports okay and also of course anything having to do with with business for-profit businesses primarily uh the wall street journal is you know the
37:42 business newspaper um i i read the wall street journal every day it's published um i do that to keep up with the business news i i'd like a you know paper newspaper as opposed to you know reading something online and um uh so it's it's a it's a great source of information it's also a great way to just keep up with a particular industries so that that you know if you're interested in a particular uh business whether it's you know auto automobiles uh media entertainment uh real estate whatever it is so you know you if you read the wall street
38:17 journal on a regular basis uh you will pretty quickly get a feel for how things are going in that industry what the major issues are how they're being handled what are the trends what are the major players in that industry etc i i should hasten that i have no financial interest in the wall street journal um although i will say i you know like many people my age i you know i i hope that you know we will continue to see uh paper printed you know newspapers uh for the foreseeable future because like i said i like being able to spend
38:53 15 20 minutes each morning with uh you know a cup of coffee or espresso reading you know the paper it's it's a nice relaxing thing to do so as opposed to you know the rest of my day where i'm seem to be looking at a computer screen so okay so that's that is online research and those those are all sources that you can uh access pretty readily shouldn't cost you any money um you may with the wall street journal of course like it has a pay wall like most periodicals these days but oftentimes at least parts of their articles are available so you can read a
39:28 little bit about them and you know maybe i shouldn't say this i don't know i think it's okay you know if you have someone who subscribes to the wall street journal and there's a particular article you want to read that you don't have access to they can access it create a pdf email it to you and depending on how good a friend they are that's probably how many times they will you know do that for you so um please no requests for wall street journal pdfs to me um that that i cannot do in good conscience uh because you know i think that's that's taking advantage
40:03 of them so all right now offline research another good thing to do is to look you know get out from your get out from behind your computer and go and research the company or the organization now one of things to do especially if if it's located nearby where you live is go and you know drive by its place of business or its place of operations take a look at it okay that'll tell you something if it's uh located in you know a heavy
40:39 industrial area of of uh you know the area in which you live obviously you don't know industrial i mean in the you know the city you live in um you know it may not be a heavy industrial business but maybe that area wasn't heavy industrial when they located there and they just stayed there even as the area has changed okay so you know take a look at that why is that the case i think that brings up several questions you know why do you continue to be located here as opposed to having migrated somewhere
41:14 else where similar businesses to yours have gone and there could be perfectly good reasons like well you know we've been an anchor of employment in this area for the last 50 years and although the area around us has changed somewhat we feel it's important to continue to be an anchor of employment in the area and we we were invested in the local community and we're going to stay that way okay well there you go i'm not sounds good to me i mean now you may say okay i got it so in other words you're not leaving this area for the you know in the near term anyway no we're not
41:49 it's like okay not really interested in living in an area where there's a lot of you know heavy industry around me um okay well so that so then there you go there and again this is not about is it the you know is it a good corporate culture a bad corporate culture necessarily it's about does does the corporate culture is it going to be a good fit for you in the end that's what we're looking for is it a good fit for you we'll set the value judgments aside those i think are better discussed when we've got you know a bottle of bourbon and and and some water in front of us and keep can
42:25 hopefully keep you know the the tempers down a little bit okay so but do it do a drive-by take take a look um and and and that will give you some information okay libraries and museums so you can call um your your uh public library the reference desk and ask for information on the organization and they will they will give you some okay i'm i've i've done this many many many times okay um and and most libraries these days um have people who are specially trained to
43:00 do research and if you tell them that you are working on your job hunt and you're looking to get information on some organizations that you're considering applying to i think you will probably get a pretty good response okay because you know you're you're giving the the reference librarian a real purpose to the work that you're asking to be you know to be to have done and and and you know as compared to some of the stuff they get you know it's nice to have something really you know meaty behind uh the work that
43:35 they're doing so visit them in person call them on the phone whatever works for you um i know in my book by the way especially if you're a veteran you know note that you're a veteran people like to help out veterans it makes them feel good and so you know let let them feel good there's nothing nothing wrong with that okay um you know you may say well museums what uh what do you mean museums well um i mean you know randomly calling a museum of course is is is not going to be useful but you there may be a museum
44:10 related to the particular industry in which you're interested and so by calling that museum you can get some background on an organization that you're considering going to work for now when i say background i mean more like history and that may that may be relevant to you for some reason okay so uh you know it this isn't the first thing i would i would you know recommend that you do but i put it on the list here because if you really want to dig in deeply if you're
44:46 really really interested in a particular company you may want to know something about um it's it's history now this is this is not by the way a knock on h m i assume it's a perfectly good company uh the reason i use this example is i i think it's funny so when i was stationed in germany we would periodically uh take a trip to i believe it was trier and uh in trier there was a particular cafe that my friends and i used to take people to pretty much every time we went there
45:21 because they had illegal coffee there and one particular friend of mine he's this is the only coffee he drinks is illegal and i will say i i do very much love uh their their their coffee so we'd be sitting in the and across the street was the h m store in trier the funny thing was after we had our coffee we would take the people we were we were with on a tour of world war ii sites in trier
45:57 and the building in which h m had its store now used to be gestapo headquarters in trier back in the i think of mid 30s mid to late 30s right now that is no reflection on h m i i just it's just a funny coincidence and people would always know that they and almost always somebody would say well is is is hmm affiliated with nazis i'm like no no no no no that's not what we're saying it's just it shows you how you know these kind of things can change right
46:32 and it's just a funny coincidence uh having said that look there are companies that have been around for a long long time that you know they may have connections to things that were not so savory shall we say in the past and that may be something you just really don't want to be involved with okay i'm not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing again this is about finding an organization that fits your sensibilities fits your needs delivers on your job satisfaction so you
47:10 know if being associated with an organization that did bad things in the past just wrangles you then then you know you're perfectly justified in excluding that organization from your job hunt um on the other hand it may be okay well i know it look you know nobody is alive today who you know in the company who was doing that you know 100 years ago um it's good to know that this is their legacy um one of the things you might want to check out is you know have they really moved beyond whatever bad things they were involved with in the past and if they have well good for them you know i
47:45 think we have to be open to redemption among you know people as well as organizations to a certain extent so again just food for thought not saying you have to do anything one way or the other but just something to think about okay next conventional publications although these law these days almost all publications are online there are some publications uh that are not online so for example i get a publication called vigneon and it is a a publication about wines and wine
48:21 making in france um they do have a website but i don't think issues of the magazine are available on the website and it's a beautiful magazine of course it's in french so um i'll sit there and you know i'll i mean i'm my french is decent um but you know i look at the beautiful photographs and i'll i'll read through some of the articles and kind of struggle through figuring out what they're talking about um and and i do it for two reasons one is i want to improve my french and two is i i you know i'm very interested in wine so it's you know france is one of the
48:57 big sources of that so you know go go to the well so to speak so there are publications and and by the way if you're interested you know in in being in the wine and spirits business um you know and you want to know what's going on in france um you're gonna you're you're gonna get it much more directly from a publication like vineyard on than you would from a website probably that's you know translated into english because it's not an exact translation no no translation is ever exact you don't get the same feel from one language to
49:32 another it's it's an incredibly difficult thing to do so uh you know take a look at that um and and you know it can be difficult by the way to get a hold of them sometimes because it may have to be mailed to you one of the things you can do is if you're looking for a particular um conventional publication is check with um a business library at a university or college now oftentimes they will have such publications in their stacks you may not be able to check them out
50:07 but you may be able to go to the university or college library and get access to them and at least look at them there on the premises okay so some again something to check out another resource for you if you're excuse me if you are still in college or university so you have full access to the library resources there absolutely use them you will find especially in the business library if you're interested in anything you know business related they will have a ton of information and oftentimes public
50:42 libraries won't have the same information because they just can't afford to go that in depth on a single subject whereas a university with a business school they need to have that so that students and faculty can do research okay so that so that there you go um you know and oh my gosh we're already up at 50 minutes so the another place to get information is from people i mentioned this before and you know you can connect with people at an organization
51:19 uh through through linkedin is the most effective way and and i i have a a lot you can see a long list of questions that you can ask uh people generally speaking you want to ask open-ended questions so you know you can say but do you like working there yeah so you're not getting much information right better question is what's your favorite part about working for the company or for the organization what's the thing you like least
51:55 about working for this organization or company right and that way they have to they'll have to think a little bit but you'll get much greater a much greater amount of information much more useful information and the ideas is get them talking okay once you've got them talking in general unless they go off on some kind of tangent just let them talk and take notes okay because the more they talk generally the deeper the deeper they'll get into something and and the more authentic you'll the the information will be more
52:31 authentic right because they're not thinking about it quite as much to make sure am i following the company line you know that kind of thing they'll give you you'll get a much truer impression from them okay so your job is to be is in essence to be an interviewer you know a journalist if you will get the person talking and and so have you know at least five to seven open-ended questions you know again uh if you want to get a pdf copy of my book you you've got them all right here for you right you just pick out these or you can just put this list in front of you and you can just use you know this this
53:07 list of questions here talk to people now um you can do that when you're researching a company and you can and you can find out you know ahead of time whether you even want to be there and do it as kind of as do it as an informational and informational interview or you may want to do it after you're already in into the hiring process or the the not the hiring process the recruitment process and and you may reach out to some people and say hey you know i'm i'm in the recruitment process for your company and i'm i'm interested to learn more about
53:42 it would you could i uh you know would you be willing to uh have a you know short phone call with me and by the way when i when i tell people a short phone call usually what i'll say is something like may i you know would you be interested in speaking to me for 25 minutes okay 25 minutes is a very specific length of time 15 minutes means around 15 minutes 30 minutes means around 30 minutes 25 minutes is 25 minutes there's there's a reason you know people
54:17 assume there's a reason for the preciseness and and so stick with it so when you get to the 24 minute point um when i do this i'll say hey you know we're we're coming up on 25 minutes here in the next minute or so i i just want to you know thank you for your time i i know i you know committed to only taking 25 minutes of it and so i don't want to go beyond that now by the way i would say at least a third of the time people say oh it's okay if we want to take a few more minutes i i have the time and i'll say you know as long as i'm not being a bother as long as i'm not you know imposing no no it's perfectly fine let's
54:52 finish our conversation well thank you very much and then we finish the conversation and you know sort of dos vidania as as they say uh should i be using russia russian right now i guess so i think it's okay okay all right so um once you're on the on site so um you know look around observe observe the you know the workspace itself an on-site visit take a look at the people how they're dressed how they interact um you know look at the physical layout all of those kinds of things they're all indicative of company or
55:30 organizational culture okay and then finally when you're at an actual meeting now it could be a meeting you know face-to-face meeting it could be you know a zoom meeting or a phone call um you know what what we call i call it a meeting to discuss a job they're usually called interviews i don't like the term interview because it implies that you're somehow you know asking for something you know go into the meeting you are looking to gather information just like the organization is looking to gather information and one of the things you
56:06 want to gather information about is the organization's culture don't hesitate to ask questions about it use the questions here in my book or come up with others on your own that are you know more relevant to your concerns but don't hesitate to ask the questions and by the way here's some here's some other questions specifically designed a meet and actual meeting if you could describe your corporate culture in three words or phrases what would you say and why okay why that's really important uh you know
56:42 innovative why innovative um well you know it's a funny thing we're actually not that innovative but that's what the company says it wants to be good piece of information or innovative well you know we are always trying out new things we're trying out new ways to serve our customers we're looking at new ways to take care of our employees we're always looking for new things to do to make things better for everybody great okay or or maybe not maybe you don't like a rapidly changing uh culture or a rapidly changing environment okay
57:17 so here's more questions you can ask at a sit-down meeting look here you go like i think two and a half three pages of them okay all right and and and this is really the core and this is why i've done these last two sessions on the issue of organizational culture organizational culture and relationships equal job satisfaction okay pay is important but i think we make a mistake when we look only at the financial side of a relationship with an organization a
57:52 company a non-profit the government whatever okay so it really is worth your time and effort to check that out there's a statistic and i i believe i this is this is probably not 100 accurate and again this relates to people coming out of the military but something like 80 percent of people uh quit their first post-military job in the first two years and i think it's over 50 in the first year and one of the reasons i think that is is because they don't realize how different
58:29 civilian workplace culture is from military workplace culture and there's a necessity to adapt and a lot of military people find that hard and so thinking that oh if i just go somewhere else i'll find a more you know comfortable culture they quit and go to another job and it sometimes it takes two three four job switches before they're comfortable enough in civilian workplace culture to be able to stick it out you know i think that's that may be a mistake on both by the way the employers and the employees
59:05 that kind of churn isn't necessarily good for anybody so if if we will take the time to learn about organizations cultures that will also help us make shifts in our own outlook we may find that you know this is just the way it is in the civilian work world today and and nothing we do is going to change that so we've got to change ourselves and that's a good thing to know because then we can work on it we can't work on something we don't know about all right well listen we're we're
59:41 eight seconds to be out of time um i hope you enjoyed the session i hope you found it worthwhile and uh as as i always do oh i i do i wanted to tell you about uh my guest next week is frankie guzman and i cannot wait for you to meet frankie he is just one of the most charismatic people i have met in a long long time we had a blast when we were together in a training he was he was actually the instructor for the training he has an amazing story to tell
60:16 i'm only going to give you a little piece of it he started out as a pig farmer okay so how often are you going to hear the success story of someone else who started there now i'm not saying there's anything wrong with being a pig farmer but it's just it's just you know people don't think of i mean there are people who still do this right and he he did it for a while and you'll hear his story as to where he is now i invite you encourage you to join us next week wednesday we are here every wednesday 12 30 pacific time 3 30 p.m eastern time an
60:53 hour in for each of the other time zones and i thank you very much for joining me and for watching if you have a if you like the show please you know please click the like thing if you have a comment please share them good or bad always looking for ways to make the show better and so it just leaves for me to say in my closing marie darling up in heaven you had such a wonderful impact on my life and you are still my bell thanks again folks have a great rest of the day