Company Information for Prospective Employment

Where to find Engineering position listings

2006-11-10T15:05:00.000-08:00

Some resources that list job opportunities

FLASH United States Patent and Trademark Office is hiring patent examiners http://usptocareers.gov/. Some positions are work-from-home! Many fields of engineering are appropriate for various patent technologies.

UNL Career Services Husker Hire Link - http://www.unl.edu/careers

Geographic sources - looking to specific cities or regions

http://www.unl.edu/careers/jobs/ - click on Geographic or specific region

By Interest area - engineering focused - http://www.unl.edu/careers/jobs/target.shtml

Type of employer - thinking beyond "corporate" - http://www.unl.edu/careers/jobs/types.shtml

General websites - mega sites - http://www.unl.edu/careers/jobs/genjobs.shtml

Other ways to find potential employers

Use Mergent Online (Access instructions and description are in a separate blog post) to find the primary SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) and the NAICS (North American Industrial Classification System) codes of a company you are interested in. Do a search on these codes in Mergent Online to find other companies that compete in the same manufacturing or service industry and check their Web sites for job listings.

Check the Websites for the organization that relates to your field of engineering for job postings. Consider joining the organization. They may have services that automatically send you postings of new job openings. Information about many engineering organizations is available as blog postings at the Engineering Library Blog http://unlenglib.blogspot.com/.

Online Business Directories

BigYellow – online yellow pages http://www.bigyellow.com

Canada Yellow Pages at http://www.yellow.ca/bl/f.jsp Search for business name, business classification, or people.

Hansaprint's links to the Yellow and White Pages of the World at http://www.hansaprint.fi/eypeng.html. Links to phone directories from around the world.

Canadian Trade Index at http://ctidirectory.com/. Search by product description, company name, trademark or brand, or keyword search.

Finding Company Information for an interview or a decision to accept an offer of employment

2006-11-10T14:52:00.000-08:00

To get started, consult the company information flowchart linked from http://www.unl.edu/vbaldwin.

Other posts on this blog give you more information about the online resources named in the flowchart and tell you how to access and use them.

Sure you can use Google to do a search on the Web to find Web sites that refer to “your” company. You will probably find some useful information such as your company’s Web site. UNL Libraries resources will be helpful in your quest for company information for three general reasons:

1. Your search will be directed to specific news articles and other sources of interest that may be hard to dig out of a general Internet search.

2. By searching in sources and tools that the UNL Libraries has paid for you will find proprietary information that is not freely available on the Internet.

3. Your search may lead you to collections and sites that organize information to your advantage when looking for a good synopsis.

These are the online resources you will want to consider:

Lexis-Nexis Academic (Business news, company profiles, and company legal information and intellectual property disputes)

Business Source Premier (Business news, company profiles, investment analysis)

Mergent Online (Company histories, profiles, financial information, etc.)

Reference USA (Detailed information about private as well as public companies)

Check the blog postings for information about these resources and how to access them online.

Question: What should I know about this company to prepare for an interview?

Some research that may be valuable in a job interview:

If the company is private, there may be only limited information about the company. You can, however, find information regarding the private company's public competitors, and use that information to ask relevant questions at the interview. For example, if a competitor has opened up a new market, you could mention that fact during an interview and ask what the prospects are for new markets.

You can do research about the industry that a company is in and get some idea of prospects for the industry, relate that during the interview, and ask a relevant question.

What is the company's patenting history, and how much does the company stress the importance of increasing its patent portfolio?

Question: What should I know to help me decide whether to take a position with this company?

Some research that may be valuable in making a decision about an offer of employment:

Credit rating
Legal disputes, intellectual property infringement issues
Company debt
How many employees in the company, how many in other company locations, subsidiaries, etc.?
What are the company's assets and liabilities?
How does this company stand up against its competitors (technologically and financially)?
What is the health of the industry the company is in?
What is the median household income and median home value for the area in which the company is located?

Check the blog postings to learn how to use these resources to answer these questions and how to access them online.

For basic information about obtaining a specific article of interest, whether available at aUNL library or at some other library, read the tutorial "Basic Access" at http://unlenglibem.blogspot.com/2006/09/basic-access.html, especially paragraph 2 "Request Materials".
For basic tips that can give you a better search, read http://unlenglibem.blogspot.com/2006/09/search-techniques.html

LexisNexis Academic

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LexisNexis Academic enables you to search for news stories about the company you are interested in, to find business information about the company, and to find legal news stories that involve the company.

To use LexisNexis Academic (Open up a new browser):

From the UNL Libraries home page at http://iris.unl.edu/ select “E-Resources”.
Choose L and scan the resulting list for Lexis-Nexis Academic.

For company business news select the “News” tab. Enter your search term in the top search box. You can leave the drop down box as “Anywhere in the Document” or select another appropriate field from the drop down menu.
Under “Specify Date" notice the default selection for date range is “Previous 3 months”. Depending on your question you many want to change the date range.
Click the search box and look at the resulting record list. By clicking on any title you can bring up the news article.
Notice in the upper right side, Lexis-Nexis Academic has print, e-mail, and download icons and a “Narrow Search” box to add a term to narrow your search.
Note that if you enter another search term in the second box, your two terms will be connected depending on your choice in the drop down menu for the connector box (“and” is the default).

For a legal news search, click on the "Legal" tab , select "Legal News" and enter the company name or other term in the search box. Be sure to change the time period you desire.
For additional suggestions, click on the "How do I..." and "Help" links.

Business Source Premier

2006-11-10T14:21:00.000-08:00

The Business Source Premier database has two basic functions for our purpose. It is an index to articles published in newspapers, journals, and magazines. By entering the name of a company in the search box you will bring up articles in these sources that mention the company. There are many ways to limit the search results. Business Source Premier is considered a “Full Text Database” in that most articles are available in their entirety, either in HTML format or as PDF’s from the printed or online source. One of the ways you can limit the search results is by “Full Text” articles only. You can also select a range of publication years to limit the search results set, or by publication type, etc. You can select a field in the box next to the search box. This will further narrow your search to a specific field in the database record (such as title, abstract, etc.). To reduce a large set of hits you may want to search your company name, for example, only in the title of the article.

The second basic function is to access profiles of a company. Information in these profiles is from Datamonitor Reports and includes a description of the business, basic company facts, key employees, major products and services, some of the company’s history, names of top competitors, and for many companies there is a valuable SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis.

To access Business Source Premier (Open up a new browser):

From the UNL Libraries home page at http://iris.unl.edu/ select “E-Resources”
Choose B and scan the resulting list for Business Source Premier
Enter the company name in the search box (“Find”). This will bring up articles in which the company is referenced.

Or: click on the “Company Profiles” tab in the upper part of the screen.
Enter the company name in the “Browse for” box and click "Browse", then click on the “Datamonitor Report” for that company.
Tips for limiting the results set are given in the above paragraphs.

Mergent Online

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To access Mergent Online (Open up a new browser):

From the UNL Libraries home page at http://iris.unl.edu/ select “E-Resources” Choose M and scan the resulting list for Mergent Online.

For each publicly traded company in the Mergent Online database, the record for a company search includes links to the following:
Company Details
Equity Pricing (including stock price chart)
Company Financials
EDGAR (a record of filings with the Security and Exchange Commission)
News (3 - sections: recent articles, major events in the company's history, and dates of upcoming earnings announcements)
Research (Institutional and Insider holdings of the company stock
Competitors
Industry Reports.

Under Company Details the following tabs give specifics: Synopsis, Highlights, History, Joint Ventures, Business, Property, Subsidiaries, Long Term Debt, Executives, and Capital Stock.

Listed among the company details are its primary SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) and the NAICS (North American Industrial Classification System) codes that can be used in business databases to find other companies that compete in the same manufacturing or service industry segments and to find information about that industry segment in other databases.

Mergent Online provides access to: Mergent bank & finance manual; Mergent industrial manual; Mergent OTC industrial manual;Mergent transportation manual; Mergent OTC unlisted manual; and Mergent public utility manual.

Reference USA

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To access Reference USA, choose "E-Resources" from the main library screen. Choose R under "browse e-resources titles" and scan the resulting list for Reference USA.

The Reference USA database contains, in module format, detailed information on more than 12 million U.S. businesses; 102 million U.S. residents; 683,000 U.S. health care providers; 1 million Canadian businesses; and 11 million Canadian residents.

The Reference USA database has two sections, business and residential. Use the residential section to determine median household income and median home value for an area. Search by zip code, area code, city, state, county, MSA (Metro Area), or a specific address. Information is gathered from the most recent census. Also given is the percentage of owner occupied housing. You can also search by phone number, last name/first name, median home value or median home income.

The business section has detailed subsidiary information for private and public companies in the form of arrows that specify their linkage. The database defines their linkage as follows: "Linkage clearly defines the relationship between parent companies, subsidiaries and branches. Through our linkage feature, you can see the names, locations and affiliations of companies that are owned by the same corporation. This will help you define the highest authority, so you can reach the decision maker you need. The "Linkage Up" will provide the subsidiary or headquarters in charge of the company. The "Linkage Down" will provide branch location or subsidiaries that report directly to the company. If the Linkage arrow is not lit up, then it is not available for that company."