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Finding common ground with an interviewer (plain version)

Engineer version: ../technical/interviewer-research.md

Walking into an interview knowing "oh, we both went to the same school" or "we both used to work at the same company" makes small talk easier and shows you did your homework. WorkWingman can help you spot those genuine connections — without scraping LinkedIn, without searching for people on your behalf, and without ever messaging or connecting with anyone for you.

What it actually does

  1. You tell it who you're interviewing with. A name, a role, maybe a LinkedIn link — you add them for a specific job.
  2. You give it their background, one of two ways:
  3. Type it in yourself — school, past employer, degree, location, whatever you already know or looked up. This always works and is the default.
  4. Paste their public profile page. You open the interviewer's own public LinkedIn profile in your own browser — the same way you'd look someone up before any interview — and paste that page into WorkWingman. It reads only that one page you already had open. It never logs into LinkedIn for you, never searches LinkedIn's people directory, and never goes back to check the page again later.
  5. It compares that against your own profile — on your own computer. Same school? Same past employer? Similar degree? Same city? If there's a real match, it shows it to you as a talking point. If there isn't, it says so plainly instead of making something up.
  6. You use it in the interview, in your own words. WorkWingman doesn't draft a message to send them, doesn't connect with them, and doesn't tell them anything about you. This is just prep for you.

What it will never do

  • It will never scrape LinkedIn profiles in bulk or search for people automatically.
  • It will never send a connection request, a message, or anything else to the interviewer.
  • It will never send your information, or the interviewer's information, anywhere outside your own computer — the "common ground" comparison happens entirely locally.
  • It will never invent a connection that isn't real. If nothing genuinely overlaps, it tells you that instead of stretching the truth.

Where to find it

Open Applied & interviews, find the job, and expand "Your interviewers" underneath it. Every panel says the same thing right on the page: this is rapport prep from public information only — WorkWingman never messages or connects with anyone here.