Go Beyond the Website

You hang up the phone – your contact came through. Your uncle’s best friend’s daughter, who is an Account Executive at JWTChiatMcCannHolliday landed you an interview for a summer internship at her agency. You’re scheduled to meet with human resources and a few other employees next week.

And the first thing you do is visit www.jwtchiatmccannholliday.com and sit through the painful Flash presentation, struggling to find their new client base, look through the work (which hasn’t been updated in over a year) so that you have some valuable interview resources from which you can pull and demonstrate your savvy.

That’s swell. You need to do that. But you need to go beyond the website. Every exec at the company is well familiar with their website – they run the day-to-day show, they want to know that you’re doing a little more. Visit some of the influential blogs (often linked on YouIntern.com) and see what critics are saying about them. Figure out where their previous employees have gone. Ask why they pursue certain new business pitches and not others.

This sounds like the simplest idea, and it’s not much more than the classic piece of advice: learn as much as you can about the agency where you’re interviewing. But the catch: there are going to be some stupid people interviewing for the same position as you (they don’t read YouIntern.com).

So get that leg-up on the competition, kid.