The Company Fact That Was True Two Years Ago

There is a sentence that shows up in a lot of otherwise-decent letters:

I was interested to see your recent expansion into the German market.

It’s specific, it’s not flattery, and it’s exactly the kind of line this site keeps telling you to write. It is also, quite often, wrong — the expansion was announced three years ago, or it was a pilot that got shut down, or it was a different company with a similar name, or the applicant read it in a summary that had compressed two unrelated things into one.

The reader’s experience of that sentence is not “this person did research.” It’s “this person is slightly out of date, and now I’m wondering what else is.”

So: specificity beats enthusiasm, and specificity has to be true. This post is about the second half of that sentence — where a checkable fact about an employer actually comes from, and the habit that keeps it from rotting.

What “checkable” means

A fact about an employer is checkable if you can answer three questions about it without hesitating:

1. Where did I read it? Not “online.” A specific page you personally opened.
2. Who published it? The company itself, a named publication, a person who works there, a conference programme.
3. When was it published? A date, not a vibe. “Recently” is not a date.

If you can’t answer all three, you don’t have a fact. You have an impression, and impressions are what produce the sentence above.

That third question is the one people skip, and it’s the one that fails in public. A detail can be perfectly real and still make you look careless because you described a 2023 announcement as recent news.

The three questions apply with particular force to anything a drafting assistant put in front of you, since a generated sentence can satisfy all the appearances of research without any of it having happened — that failure is its own problem and worth reading separately.

Where the checkable ones live

Ranked roughly by how much value they return per minute spent.

1. The job posting itself. Still the best source and still the most ignored one. It is written now, by someone at the company, about the job you’re applying for. Nothing else you find will be that current or that relevant. If you only do one piece of research, do the four-minute read of the posting and stop there.

2. Material the company published about its own work. Documentation, a changelog, release notes, an engineering or research blog, a help centre. These are usually dated, usually written by people close to the work, and usually boring — which is why almost nobody quotes them, and why quoting one lands.

3. Dated coverage by an outside publisher. A funding round, an acquisition, a product launch, a regulatory filing. Useful precisely because someone else attached a publication date and a byline to it.

4. A talk, paper, or post by a person who works there. A conference session, a technical write-up, a public slide deck. This is the richest source of all for outreach, because it gives you something to respond to rather than something to congratulate.

Not on the list: the About page, the mission statement, the careers-page culture copy, and any page whose adjectives outnumber its nouns. Those produce manufactured admiration, which is the failure mode this whole exercise exists to avoid.

The date is a field, not a feeling

Here is the useful mental model. When information about an organisation gets handled by a machine rather than a reader, the date stops being part of the prose and becomes a separate labelled slot next to it — which is the only reason “is this recent?” is answerable at all.

Serply’s documentation for its news product describes the shape plainly: the metadata Serply’s news endpoint returns per result is the publisher, the date, a summary, and the entities mentioned. Four fields per article, and the date is one of them, sitting beside the text rather than inside it.

Copy that structure by hand. When you find something worth putting in a letter, write down four things in a scratch file: publisher, date, one-line summary, who or what it’s about. It takes fifteen seconds. It also makes the stale-fact problem impossible to miss, because you have to physically type the year.

If a source won’t give you a date, treat it as unusable for anything you’d describe as recent. An undated page is not evidence of currency; it is evidence that somebody didn’t bother.

Facts rot at different speeds

Not everything needs to be fresh. Sort what you find:

Rots fast. Headcount. Funding described as “recent.” Who runs a team. Office locations. Product names. Anything phrased as “just launched” or “now hiring for the new X.” Six months is old for these; two years is embarrassing.

Rots slowly. What the product actually does. The shape of the market it sells into. The regulatory constraint the industry operates under. A technical decision documented in public. These stay usable for years, and they’re better material anyway, because they’re about the work rather than about the news.

Notice which column has the interesting sentences in it. The pressure to cite something recent mostly comes from wanting to prove you did research. But the reader isn’t grading your diligence — they’re deciding whether you understand the job. A three-year-old architecture post you clearly read beats a three-week-old funding headline you clearly skimmed.

Write it so the date is visible

The sentence-level fix is small: put the attribution in the sentence, and let the tense do the hedging.

Weak: I was excited to read about your recent move into logistics.

Strong: Your engineering blog has a post from last spring about splitting the scheduling service out of the monolith — the section on backfilling historic jobs is the part I’d want to ask about, because I did that badly once.

The second version names the source, dates it loosely but honestly, and — this is the point — is still a good sentence even if the project has since been abandoned. It reports what you read, not what is currently true. That distinction is your entire protection against a stale fact, and it costs you nothing.

The same move works in a cold message to a hiring manager, where a dated reference is often the only reason the message isn’t deleted.

When you find nothing

Sometimes there is nothing. A small firm with no blog, no coverage, no public engineers, and a posting assembled from a template.

Do not fill the gap with invention, and do not fill it with adjectives. Write about the work instead — how the job is actually done, what the hard part usually is, what you’d expect to find in the first month. You know that, it’s true, and it’s checkable in the only way that matters: you’ll still believe it in the interview.