Is This Company Stable? How to Check an Employer Before You Apply, Interview or Accept
How to judge an employer's stability: the public records to read before you apply, what to learn from each interviewer, and what to check in the offer.
By Alexander Hoff · Founder
Nobody outside a company can know for certain, but you can get close enough to decide well by checking at three points. Before you apply, public records show what has already happened. In interviews, the people inside can tell you what the records cannot: runway, why the seat is open, and how leadership sees risk. At the offer, you check the terms against what you were told.
This checking has a name, candidate due diligence, and the phrase already has two settled meanings. In law and finance, it is the review before a deal: Cornell's Legal Information Institute says due diligence "commonly involves reviewing financial records and other relevant documentation such as before making a securities offering or a business acquisition." In hiring, it points the other way, at employers checking candidates, as in the EEOC and FTC's guide on background checks for employers who "want to consider the backgrounds of applicants and employees." Neither is meant here. Candidate due diligence is the checking a job seeker does on the employer: whether the company is sound, whether the role is real and funded, and what the offer is worth.
This is the first article in Interview for Intel, a series on running a senior job search with deliberate objectives, through applications, interviews and negotiations.
What does it mean to treat interviews as intel gathering?
It means you walk into each conversation with two or three things you need to find out, and you walk out with an answer, or a note of what nobody would tell you. Most interview prep is about being evaluated. You are deciding too, and an hour with someone inside the company is the best access you will get.
I've spent over a decade building partner ecosystems and programs from zero. About a month and a half after I was laid off, I started using that skill set in my own job search, and that's actually how Telosi was born. I did the research up front, so I understood what the company needed and why the role mattered. Naturally, that left me with genuine questions that publicly available sources couldn't answer, and those became the topics I probed in interviews.
I'll also note that I'm not good in interviews. Put me in front of a Fortune 1000 C-suite and I'm fine negotiating partnerships, but having to promote myself in interviews always felt unnatural, which I think a lot of candidates run into. Gathering intel gave me a blueprint for each interview. It helped me relax and engage more genuinely, and the interviews turned into organic working sessions rather than your standard question and answer.
A candidate who is strategically deliberate simply shows up different in interviews. A hiring leader quoted by First Round Review describes what that looks like from the other side of the table: "When the candidate has the courage to ask a question that might challenge the interviewer, that's a positive signal."
| Stage | Your objective | What you leave with |
|---|---|---|
| Before you apply | Decide from public records whether the company deserves the hours | A short list of open risks to ask about |
| Interviews | Learn what the records cannot show, one interviewer at a time | Answers on runway, the seat and the plan, or a note of who would not say |
| The offer | Check the terms against what you heard | The equity facts behind the number |
Each answer feeds the next round, so your application intelligence keeps growing after you apply.
What can I check about a company's stability before I apply?
Write down every gap you hit in these sources, because each one becomes an interview question. The wider research is in what to research about a company.
- On the SEC's free EDGAR search, read the 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K filings newest first. In the 10-K, read Item 1A, risk factors, and the liquidity discussion in Item 7 (Investor.gov). Open last year's 10-K beside it and note any risk factor that is new.
- Run full-text search, company filter on, for "substantial doubt", the accounting phrase for doubt that a company can continue as a going concern (FASB). Not finding it guarantees nothing.
- In the 8-K list, look for Item 2.05 (restructuring), Item 5.02 (a senior officer leaving) and Item 3.01 (a delisting notice). Most 8-Ks are due within four business days of the event (Form 8-K).
- Search EDGAR for form type D, due within 15 days of the first sale in a Regulation D raise. It shows a raise happened and roughly how big, but "contains little other information about the company", so runway goes on your interview list.
- Find the date of the last priced round in the company's funding announcement or the press coverage of it. Carta says a longer gap between rounds "is not necessarily a bad thing", so take the date into the interviews as a question.
- WARN notices are filed state by state, so check each state where the company has an office, such as California's WARN report, New York's WARN Dashboard and Washington's layoff table. Federal WARN counts job losses site by site, so cuts spread across offices can stay under every threshold.
- Search layoffs.fyi, which calls its own figures "likely an undercount", and open each entry's source link.
- Compare the careers and leadership pages with their copies from six and twelve months ago in the Wayback Machine. A thinner page is one weak clue; whether one posting is live is covered in how to tell if a job posting is real.
A layoff on the record tells you less than it seems to. In a sample of 18 companies we have published Verified Reads on, our dated and sourced company pages, four had a layoff or closure on the record in the 24 months to October 13, 2026, and two of those four grew headcount across the period of the cuts. Our CrowdStrike read, verified September 3, 2026, records about 500 roles cut in a plan announced in May 2025, and headcount rising from 10,118 to 10,698 across the fiscal year that included the cuts. When a company is cutting one team and hiring for another, find out which one you would join.
In tech, look harder. Challenger, Gray & Christmas counted 165,925 announced technology job cuts through September 2026, up 54% on the same months of 2025, while announced cuts across all industries fell 39% (September 2026 report). A sector count says nothing about one company, so take what your own checks could not confirm into the interviews.
What should I find out from each interviewer?
Each interviewer knows different things. I started writing down the questions and topics I wanted to probe for each round, based on the stage of the interview, the topic of the interview (was this person gauging culture fit, domain experience, and so on), and the interviewer themselves: their role, background and working methodology. With new intel came new questions that the next interviewer could add color to. My questions about the company itself went to its stability, growth trajectory, competitive positioning and moats, and strategic priorities.
When a question is sensitive, say why you are asking. First Round passes on Anna Binder's advice to preface a question "with what you'd like to glean." For example: "I'm trying to understand how this team gets resourced next year. How many hires are planned?"
- "Why is this role open: new headcount, a backfill or a reorganization?" Coursera suggests asking why a new position was created. For a backfill, ask how long the last person stayed.
- "If after 12 months I've failed, where did we go wrong?" (First Round Review)
- "How many people would report to me on day one, and how many more are budgeted?" First Round's guide to joining a startup warns that big-company candidates assume a large team and find one or two direct reports.
- "What is the company's runway at the current headcount?" and "with planned growth?" Cristina Cordova, in the same guide: "Anything under 12 months deserves a more thorough conversation."
- "If the company failed in 18 months, what's the likely reason why?"
If the recruiter and the hiring manager describe different jobs, put both versions to the next interviewer and ask which one the company is hiring for. Our CrowdStrike read builds its hiring question from the filings: "The 2025 plan that reduced roles by about 500 positions was reported complete as of July 31. What is the headcount plan for this team through the rest of fiscal 2027?" For using your research in the room, see how to research a company before an interview.
Find out whether the company can fund this role, and the team around it, for as long as you plan to stay.
The public record first: filings, layoff notices and funding announcements. Then the recruiter on the seat, the hiring manager on the team's budget, and an executive or founder on runway.
A runway answer, or a note of who would not give one. Why the seat is open and how many hires the team has budgeted. Whether your team is the one hiring or the one being cut.
What should I verify before I accept an offer?
Start from your interview notes: the runway answer, the date of the last round, the hiring plan, and what someone would not say. Check the offer against each one.
For a private company, if any of those is still open, Holloway's equity guide suggests asking what has been raised, at what valuation, and how long current funding will last: you "may not get full answers to all of these, but you should at least ask."
Then learn the equity terms. This is general information, not legal, tax or investment advice; ask a tax adviser or employment lawyer about your own grant.
| Term | What it means | The question to ask |
|---|---|---|
| 409A valuation | An independent appraisal of the common stock that sets the minimum strike price (Carta) | "What is the most recent 409A valuation, and when was it done?" |
| Liquidation preference | In a sale, preferred investors get their money back before common holders, including most employees (a16z) | "What is the aggregate liquidation preference on top of the preferred stock?" |
| Liquidity | Tender offers, where shareholders sell at a set price, "aren't routine occurrences" (Carta) | "How would equity in this offer turn into cash, and when is the next chance?" |
The liquidity question in the last row comes from our Rippling read.
How does Telosi help answer "is this company stable?"
Telosi's Research Brief does the public-record pass for one company and role: funding and valuation, a financial profile, a bear case with warning signs to monitor, a dated year of developments, and risks that each say how they would happen and what to watch. Claims are checked against the pages they cite, and high-risk claims are re-checked against fresh sources. Where the public record is silent, the brief says "no public data on X" rather than "the company has no X," and it names the important gaps outright, so you know what to ask in the interviews.
For some companies we also publish Verified Reads, which describe stability in words rather than with a score.
With a full Application Kit, the Interview prep tab in the Candidate Portal groups your questions by purpose: "Tests a risk", "Learns their priorities" and "Intel for the next round". When you log a round, your answer to "What did you learn?" is saved as a note that carries into the next round's prep.
What else do candidates ask about company stability?
Is it OK to ask about layoffs in an interview?
Yes, if you do the reading first, then ask about what already happened and how the company has changed since. Brittany Dolin, quoted by The Muse: "If the question is asked professionally and with curiosity, not fear, most employers will respect it."
I found no layoff news. Does that mean there were none?
No. WARN notices cover only cuts above single-site thresholds, trackers count only what was reported, and many cuts are never announced. Write down what you checked, with the source and the date, and take what you could not confirm into the interviews.
What if the company won't share its runway?
Ask who would know; some interviewers "may not know enough about the company's current state to answer it properly". A refusal from the person who does know is different. Sean Byrnes, quoted by First Round Review: "Failure to share these things is a warning sign."