The more articles you collect, the more bios you download, the better you get at creating these profiles. All this material is on the Web. One client hired us to help figure out whether a competitor was going to start competing more aggressively on cost. Those few words were a small but important sign to me that this company was going to be incredibly cost-conscious. They offer great clues about where a company is heading in its pursuit of markets and technologies.
Companies are between a rock and a hard place here.
Most of them desperately need talented people, so they have to advertise their openings aggressively. But the more jobs they post, the more they expose themselves to people like us, who know how to analyze the postings. If you examine the kinds of backgrounds that a company looks for in its systems people, you can get a good sense of its technical infrastructure. Say a search unearths a Web site that's really valuable. It's a nice feature.