Different jobs, one habit: doing your homework on a company before you act. Here is who reaches for a dossier, why, and what they pull out of it.
A dossier is a fast, sourced map of a company built entirely from the public record — its people, hiring, money, locations, tech, news, relationships and risk, all in one file. That map means different things depending on the chair you sit in.
A salesperson reads it for the angle: who runs the place, what they are hiring for, where the budget might be moving. A recruiter reads the same file for the org chart and the headcount curve — is this a healthy place to send a candidate, and who would they report to. An investor reads it to screen a deal in minutes instead of a morning. A founder reads it to size a competitor or scout a partner. A journalist reads it to find the thread worth pulling. And the diligence and procurement crowd read it as a first-pass risk file — a fast way to know whether a target or a supplier deserves a deeper look.
The point is not that a dossier replaces your judgement. It does the legwork — the forty tabs, the cross-referencing, the "where did I read that" — so the first ninety seconds of your research are already done. Every line points back to where it came from, so you can verify anything before you lean on it. Treat it as a starting map, not a verdict.
Same nine sections every time. What changes is which sections you read first, and what you do with them. Pick the chair that fits the work in front of you:
Each page below is written for one job — the searches, the workflow and the sections that matter to it.
Walk into the call already knowing the room — and exactly where you fit.
Vet an employer and sketch the org chart before you pitch a candidate.
Source, screen and map a private company without a week of open tabs.
Size a competitor, map the market and scout partners on one page.
Start an investigation with a map of the company instead of a blank page.
Run a fast first-pass file on a target before the real diligence begins.
Do a KYB-style check on a supplier and surface the risk flags early.
Don't see your exact role? The file is the same regardless. If your week involves figuring out a company you don't already know — to sell to it, hire from it, fund it, compete with it, report on it or buy from it — a dossier saves you the first hour. Start anywhere above, or just open a file on a company you already have an opinion about and see how much the public record agrees with you.
pick a company. read the whole story in minutes.