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Stalk Your Way to a New Job

Stalk like a career professional

Featured Author:

Tania Khadder

Tania is a writer, editor, blogger, and TV enthusiast. She likes indie rock, good food, vodka gimlets, and living in San Francisco. She also likes dancing, but of course, not to indie rock. Tania has a BA in Anthropology from UCLA, and an MA in International Journalism from City University in London. After being laid off from their jobs in November, Tania and a friend launched Unemploymentality.com where she wrote about all things unemployment. When she isn’t writing, she’s spending time with friends and family, obsessively surfing the web, or much to everyone’s annoyance, doing both simultaneously.

More articles from this author:

• Daylight Saving Time: 5 Ways to Reap the Benefits
• 5 Ways to Vet Your Next Employer
• The 5 Friends You Should Have at Your Entry-Level Job

The internet has made stalkers out of all of us. You know exactly what I’m talking about.

But instead of stalking your ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend, consider using your newfound detective skills for more productive (i.e. less emotionally jarring) purposes, like snagging the job of your dreams.

Interested in a company and need to find a person to contact? Google away. Trying to suss out the guy who’s interviewing you next week? Facebook him!

Within minutes, you can find out where he’s from, how to reach him, where he’s worked in the past, and – perhaps most importantly – what his favorite movie is. The more you know about him, the better your ability to sell yourself.

We’re not suggesting you cultivate an entirely false personality to match your interviewer — that would be disingenuous and would surely come back to bite you.

But knowing a bit more about someone can help you find points of commonality you might otherwise have missed. If you find out they went to your alma mater, you can ever-so-subtly work that into the conversation in an interview. Or maybe you share the same taste in music? Find an appropriate way to bring it up. We all know that getting hired has a lot to do with likeability. And fair or not, people generally like other people who are similar to them. Why miss out on an opportunity to highlight these similarities?

Are you ready to do some in-depth detective work? Luckily, you’ve got an extremely powerful investigative tool right at your fingertips. Abuse it wisely!