How The Informational Interview Helps You Get The Job

By Drake Baer

Anthony Moore has the things that old folks in old movies like ambitious young whippersnappers to have: moxie, pluck, spunk, and the like. He's a new college grad with, appropriately enough, a site for new college grads, and while he is yet to land his yearned-for dream job in "content writing," he is hustling up connections--the kind that, we know, land gigs.

How so? From a hard-earned nepotism begotten from attending an elite university? From being born into immense social standing? By creating a ridiculously great "I quit" YouTube hit? No: our Mr. Moore, as a good millennial does, engineers his own nepotism.

The secret: the informational interview.

Let's allow him to tell us what that means:

An informational interview is a meeting between two people, one who’s a professional working in a certain field or industry and one who’s looking to learn more about that industry and get their foot in the door.

Let's go over why informational interviews are awesome.

Surprisingly, informational interviews yield awesome information (and contacts)

When we talked to Bob Pozen last year, the former financial heavyweight, current Harvard Business School lecturer, and recent author of Extreme Productivity said that when you're on the job hunt (or planning for your career in general), the best way to get to know if you want to work in a field (without the full-on commitment of starting a job) is to simply talk to the people who do it.

Learn the parts that rock, the parts that suck, and the parts that are surprising. People love to read "what I wish I would have known when I was 22" blog posts; informational interviews allow you to pull that refracted reflectiveness out of the professionals that you have a job-crush on.

Additionally, you can ask these successful folks what skills they wish they had right now: like, say, a fluency in data or programming or visualization. Then we can look for gigs that let us grow those skill sets or not give a damn and and learn in-demand skills on our own time.

But the knowledge ain't the only thing. Because if the interview goes well, as Moore says, you'll now know somebody in the industry. Somebody that likes you, which is the way people land jobs.

Informational interviews let you get to know each other

As Northwestern management professor Lauren Rivera will tell you, hiring is much more like dating than a hiring manager might like to admit.

Folks tend to hire people who remind them of themselves, the people who they wouldn't mind being stuck with in an airport with, the people who they "click" with. The thing is, though, when we say we "click" with someone, that's a way of saying that you have same interests, background, and goals.

Additionally, when you do the interview you can get to know the personality (or psychographic, if you want to get pedantic) of the folks in organization or industry in question. Why is this important? The informational interview, then, is a way of ferreting out that "click" with a hiring manager. In a lightly Machiavellian sense, you could better learn to tailor your self-presentation to the hiring person's own self-perception.

Ok, so how do you do them?  Find out HOW and read the complete Fast Company article