As a candidate, when there are companies I'm interested in working at I research the hell out of them. A lot of companies will put employees on their website an

As a candidate, when there are companies I'm interested in working at I research the hell out of them. A lot of companies will put employees on their website and I will research the profile of every person on it. If they don't, I find all the employees I can other ways. If they have an engineering blog I read everything I can, then I research the authors. I research the investors, the market, including competitors and any analyst commentary I can find. I look for past employees and try and calculate a rough idea of churn rate. I basically build as perfect a model of the company as I can as an outsider, and then I test the model throughout the interview process, updating as I go. I make it clear to people that I've done this through ways both subtle and obvious. "I noticed on your profile you were at X last, did you work with Y?" "From my research it seems like your CTO left earlier this year, can you tell me the story behind that?" "This journalist says you're doomed, which is funny because you don't look doomed, but what would you say to them if you could talk to them directly?" Etc. Yes, this involves a lot of online stalking people. Honey badger doesn't care.