Research someone before a meeting

You have a name on a calendar hold and twelve minutes before the call. The job is not to assemble a biography. The job is to walk in able to ask one specific question, quote one thing they actually said in public, and avoid briefing the wrong person. This method runs on the open web. You do not need OneSearch to follow it. You do need a stop line: if two public identities still fit, you do not write a brief.

Why you research at all

Meeting prep fails in two opposite ways. You arrive knowing nothing and spend the first five minutes reconstructing their job from small talk. Or you arrive with unsourced notes — a stale title, a hobby from the wrong account, a talk given by a different Alex Chen — and you perform homework that is not theirs. The useful output is a short, sourced page you can defend if they ask how you knew.

That is conversation prep, not eligibility. Do not use this method to decide whether to hire, rent to, lend to, or insure someone. That is a different product and a different statute. The FTC Fair Credit Reporting Act page is the official starting point; read FCRA and legal use if the meeting is actually a screen. This page is not legal advice.

Write down what you already have

Open the invite before you open a search box. Copy four fields onto a note you will keep next to the queries: full name as written, company as written, title if present, and the purpose of the meeting in one sentence. Add the introducer if there is one. That sentence is the brief's job description. "I am meeting Alex Chen to decide whether our payments integration is even the right conversation" is a job. "Learn about Alex Chen" is not.

Then list what you will not look for. Health, family, religion, criminal records, credit, home address, and anything behind a login you do not have are out of scope. If the invite only has a first name, stop and ask the organizer for a last name and a company.

The 12-minute method

Time-box it. If you cannot finish in twelve minutes, you are collecting, not briefing. The clock is the method.

1. Minutes 0–2 — inventory. Name, company, title, meeting purpose, and the exclusion list. One sentence for why you are in the room.
2. Minutes 2–5 — query. Four searches, not forty. Quotes around the name, then company, then a public-artifact query. Copy the exact strings. Do not rewrite them mid-flight because a tempting headline appeared.
3. Minutes 5–7 — confirm. You need one unique public artifact that ties name + company + a face or a byline together. A team page, a talk, a dated byline, a public repo under that employer. If two cards still fit, stop. There is no brief yet.
4. Minutes 7–11 — extract. Three to five facts, each with a URL and a date. Current role. One thing they have said or shipped in public. One company-relevant fact you will actually use. Leave the rest in the tab.
5. Minutes 11–12 — write the walk-in note. Six to eight lines. Sources attached. One question you will ask. One thing you will not mention because it is thin or unverified.

A brief written before confirmation is a first draft of a professional error. The lookup flow is the same in tabs or in a product: name, confirm, sources, brief, then questions.

Build the queries

Use documented Google operators only: quotes to keep the name together, site: to stay on one host, OR for public-artifact words, a minus to drop an obvious collision, and filetype:pdf when you want a speaker bio or a paper. Do not treat operators as a way around a login. If a page asks you to sign in, you do not have it. The query builder below is a teaching tool — it does not search OneSearch. Copy a line into Google. For the operator reference, use Google operators for people research.

Run them in this order. First: "Full Name" Company City. You want the company site, a news mention, or a talk to surface in the first page. Second: "Full Name" site:linkedin.com/in — a public profile is a candidate card, not a biography, and titles go stale. Third: "Full Name" site:company.com — team pages and bylines beat aggregator bios. Fourth: "Full Name" (talk OR podcast OR interview). That last query is how you find something you can quote without inventing a personality.

If the first page is all other people, add one breadcrumb you already had — city, a product name from the invite, or the introducer's company — before you add more operators. More operators on a wrong identity just make a cleaner wrong brief. When Google and a people brief disagree, the original page wins. See OneSearch vs Google for when a confirm-first page is faster than another tab.

Confirm before you brief

Confirmation is one unique public artifact, not a vibe. The artifact has to tie the name on the invite to one living public identity. A LinkedIn headline that matches the company is a candidate, not a confirm, because headlines are edited and reused. A company team page with a photo that matches a talk recording is a confirm. A PDF speaker bio with the same middle initial and the same talk title is a confirm. Two profiles that both say "engineer, San Francisco" is not a confirm.

Write the confirm line in the note before you extract facts: "Same person because [artifact] on [URL] dated [year]." If you cannot finish that sentence, you do not have a person yet. Common names collide on purpose. The method for that collision is its own guide: confirm the right person. Do not merge two cards because the meeting is in four minutes. Walk in thin. Ask them which team they are on. That is cheaper than quoting the Austin founder to the SF engineer.

Worked example: Alex Chen

The invite says "Alex Chen, Stripe, 30 min — payments latency." A mutual, Priya, booked it after a conference hallway conversation last year. Purpose sentence: you are deciding whether a latency conversation is even the right meeting, and you want one question that is about their public work, not their resume. Exclusion list: no home address, no family, no criminal or credit lookup, no scraping of anything behind a login.

Queries you actually run:

• "Alex Chen" Stripe "San Francisco"
• "Alex Chen" site:linkedin.com/in
• "Alex Chen" site:stripe.com
• "Alex Chen" (talk OR podcast OR interview) latency

The first page is a collision. One Alex Chen is a staff engineer at a payments company in San Francisco, with a conference talk on tail latency and commits in a public GitHub org. Another is a principal at a quantitative shop in New York; a faculty page PDF shows a different middle initial. A third is a founder of a logistics startup in Austin who was on a podcast last month — different face, different company. You were told: the SF engineer who spoke on latency. That is the only card that can be confirmed. The NYC and Austin cards are lookalikes. They do not go in the brief. They do not get a "maybe also."

Confirm line: same person because the 2025 conference talk titled on p99 latency shows the same face as the Stripe team page, and the GitHub org commits are under that employer. Extract, with URLs you will keep:

• Staff engineer, payments, San Francisco — company team page, dated this year.
• Public talk on tail latency, with slides as a PDF — you will quote the constraint they named, not a paraphrase from memory.
• No personal blog you can date. Do not invent a writing practice.

Walk-in note, six lines: Alex Chen, staff engineer at Stripe in SF, confirmed via team page + latency talk. They framed p99 as the customer-visible number, not average. Question you will ask: "You treated tail latency as the constraint — has that shifted, or is it still the thing that kills the integration?" You will not mention the NYC faculty page. You will not mention the Austin podcast. You will not say "I saw you're into" anything that did not appear on those two sources. If the talk is two years old, you say so in the question. Stale is fine. Invented-current is not.

If Priya had said only "Alex Chen at a payments company" with no city and no talk, you would not have a confirm. Write back for a team name, or walk in and ask which Alex they meant.

Worked example: Maria Garcia

You are a founder. The invite: "Maria Garcia — possible advisor, 20 min." The intro email says she was a VP of operations at a Miami logistics company and appeared on a trade podcast last quarter talking about port delays. Purpose sentence: you want to know whether her public work is about the same operational problem you have, and one question that proves you heard the episode. Exclusion list: this is not a diligence file, not a background check, not a tenant or credit decision. If you later need regulated screening for any role, that is a CRA workflow, not this note. See people research for founders for the same confirm-first job in a longer meeting cycle.

Queries:

• "Maria Garcia" logistics Miami
• "Maria Garcia" site:linkedin.com/in
• "Maria Garcia" (podcast OR interview) port
• "Maria Garcia" filetype:pdf speaker — only if a bio PDF would uniquely tie the podcast to a company.

Collision is expected. Maria Garcia is a high-collision name across US and LATAM public pages. Title plus city beats a middle initial. You will see a journalist in Madrid, a school-board member in Texas, and an operations leader in Miami. The podcast show notes list the Miami company and a photo that matches a public conference badge. That is the confirm. The journalist and the school-board member are other people. Do not merge them because a headline also says "Garcia on supply chains." Supply chains are a topic, not an identity.

Extract: current or last public role (dated — VP titles move), the podcast episode with a timestamp on the port-delay claim, and whether the company still lists her. If the company team page no longer includes her, you write "last listed as VP, page updated, title may have changed" and you do not call her the current VP in the first sentence. Walk-in question: "On the podcast you said port delay was eating the buffer you used to keep in the warehouse — is that still the constraint you would start with for a company our size?" You will not mention a home neighborhood that an aggregator page invented. You will not mention a relative who shares the name. You will not treat a people-directory age or phone number as a fact.

If the podcast is real but the photo does not match any other public page, you have a possible artifact, not a confirm. Ask if that episode was hers. Asking is allowed. Merging is not.

Failure modes

These are the ways this method produces a worse meeting than doing nothing.

• Briefing the lookalike.You quote the Austin founder's podcast to the SF engineer. They know immediately you have the wrong person. The rest of the meeting is recovery. Fix: confirm line before extract. If you cannot write it, walk in thin.
• Treating LinkedIn as current.Headlines lag, contractors keep old employer names, and people reuse titles. Fix: prefer a company page or a dated talk. If only LinkedIn exists, write "public profile says" and ask them to correct it.
• Inventing a personality from thin social. Three likes and a photo dump are not interests you can mention. Fix: quote a talk, a byline, or nothing. Thin beats invented.
• Stale as current.A 2022 keynote is useful if you date it. It is a lie if you say "you've been talking about X" as if it were last month. Fix: put the year in the question.
• Turning prep into a screen. You paste the note into a hiring packet as if it were a consumer report. That is the wrong statute and the wrong product. OneSearch is not a consumer reporting agency. Stop and use a CRA. The line is in people search is not a background check.
• Unauthorized access. A PDF behind a login, a resume on an internal tracker, a CRM field you should not have opened. If you are not entitled to the page, it is not a source. Close it. Do not put it in the note.
• Over-collecting. Twenty tabs and no walk-in question. Fix: the clock. At minute eleven you write six lines or you walk in with the inventory sentence only.

What you walk in with

The artifact you carry is a note, not a performance. Six to eight lines is enough:

1. Name, role, company, city — each marked confirmed or "profile says."
2. The unique artifact and its URL.
3. One public claim you might quote, with a date.
4. One question that depends on that claim.
5. One thing you will not mention.
6. The meeting purpose sentence, unchanged from minute two.

You do not read the note at them. You use it to start in the middle. Reciting their job history is a deposition. If a fact will be spoken, open the original page once more before you join. Dates move. Team pages update on a Friday.

A thin brief is a successful brief when the web is quiet. Accept the silence rather than padding the note from a directory. Sales first-calls use the same extract; the question changes. See pre-call people research for sales if the meeting is a discovery call rather than a partner conversation.

When not to research

Do not run this method when the decision on the other side of the meeting is hire / no-hire, tenant, credit, or insurance eligibility. Public-web prep is not a consumer report. OneSearch is not a CRA. Use a compliant screening process and counsel — this guide will not deputize a search box. Do not run it to find a personal address, to contact someone who asked not to be contacted, or to assemble a file on a person who is not a party to a legitimate professional conversation. Harassment is not research.

Do not run it when you have only a first name. Do not run it when two confirmed artifacts point at two different people and you cannot tell which one accepted the invite. Email the organizer. Walk in and ask. The cost of a thin open is one awkward minute. The cost of a confident wrong brief is the rest of the relationship.

If you finish with three sourced lines and a question, you are done. Close the tabs. The note exists so you do not invent the first five minutes.