As the temperatures warm up and we move through spring, our thoughts turn fondly to – well, for many students, you’re thinking about job-hunting. You’re thinking about potential employers, maybe you have some interviews lined up. You want to know more about a company as a potential employer, and you want to go beyond what you find on the company’s website and some quick web searching. If you’re a business student, you’ve probably done a good deal of company research for class projects. But if you haven’t done it recently, or aren’t a business student, here are some tips and suggestions.

Get a good overview. Business Insights: Essentials and Business Source Premier are great places to check for a basic overview of a public company (one that sells stock or other registered securities to the public.) This can include a description of the company, financial information, and news stories. BSP, BIE, and OneSource Global Business Browser include SWOT reports, which summarize Strengths and Weaknesses of a business, and the Opportunities and Threats it faces in the business environment.

Focus your search. BSP and ABI/INFORM Trade & Industry each have a way to search for items about a company that’s more precise than keyword searching. This helps a lot with companies like Target or even Google, whose names are part of daily life. (The word “target,” for example, can refer to target markets, target dates, target-based pay, and of course target practice.) In BSP, you can use the pull-down menu to search for Target as a “company entity,” to get articles specifically about Target the company. And in ABI, you can search for Target as a “company/organization.”

Find those private companies, too. As mentioned in an earlier blog post, PrivCo is our newest business resource, covering privately-held companies that average around $50,000,000.00 in annual revenue. For smaller companies, ReferenceUSA is a “business phone book” covering 24 million U.S. businesses. In the Custom Search, you can look for companies by name, business type, business size, location, and more.

Don’t forget the news. Yeah, you can find news on the web, but some precision searching can help here as well. ProQuest Newsstand, like ABI, lets you search for articles on a “company/organization.” That helps focus your search in local news sources, like the Star Tribune or Pioneer Press, as well as major papers from other cities (the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times, just to drop a few names.) And my good friend BizLink has full-text coverage of 40 regional business journals, including the Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal and business journals from Atlanta, Denver, Milwaukee, Portland, and Silicon Valley. It’s a great place to search for information on local or regional companies, and you get that local perspective that you don’t find in national sources.

Be sure to check our career and employment resources guide as part of your job search. And good luck!