Informational Interviewing – Learn Cool Stuff, Meet Amazing People, and Stack the Deck in your Favor

February 26, 2021

By Matt Miner

Imagine you possess a superpower and no one ever told you. Imagine a way to earn a few hundred thousand additional dollars over the course of your work life using only your pen, your phone, and your and internet connection. Imagine a tool that enriches your experience and the experience of others, and enhances joy in your daily work. Imagine a technique to move beyond “networking”, to build real relationships with people you care about, to use time efficiently and get home in time for dinner. If there’s a free lunch for your career (even if you buy lunch), this is it.

Just what is this elixir of success? It’s called Informational Interviewing.

Four Purposes for Today’s Show

I created this informational interviewing show for a few reasons. First, the episode today is a follow-up to one of the actionable bits of advice from the Mary Beck White-Sutton interview. Listener feedback from the Mary Beck episode confirms the result I expected: It found a place in your heart and you learned some stuff. It’s good to have something you can go do when you learn stuff, and Informational Interviewing is one thing you can go do.

Second, if you’re mainly on the receiving end of info meeting requests, today’s show can be time saver for you. Make this episode, and the Mary Beck episode that precedes it, a piece of pre-work you assign to your conversation partners before they schedule with you. It will improve the quality of your experience on the kneehole side of the desk.

Third, I recommend info meetings so often - to clients, to members of my own network, and to “young people” (now that I’m “old people”) - that I wanted a piece of content where I direct these friends for a primer on what informational interviewing is and how to do it. Now, I can deliver a mini-course, first with Mary Beck, then with this how-to show.

Finally, informational interviewing is a timely skill to cultivate during the Covid-19 pandemic. People’s careers and work tasks are disrupted. Whether you’ve lost your job, are seeking different work, or find your role in flux within your current firm, informational meetings are your ticket to make the high-quality connections necessary execute your pivot and level-up your contributions to your employer and / or customers and clients. Also, you can use info meetings to stay in touch with people you know. They’ll take your calls, as most of us are more isolated than usual.

Defining Informational Interviews / Informational Meetings / Info Meetings

In the show I define informational interviewing as “a meeting with an acquaintance or member of your extended network for the purpose of learning from them, deepening your relationship with them, and, if all goes well, expanding your network to include members of your conversation partner’s network. The goal is NOT to land a job, though anything is possible. The goal is learning – learning about the person, learning about their firm, and learning how they may be willing to introduce you to others in their network.”

Why Informational Interviewing?

This boils down to the fact that employers are reluctant to hand out big jobs. McKinsey’s and our own experience tell us firm’s make offers slowly, and the bigger the job, the longer it takes. But if you’ve laid the groundwork, getting a 30 minute call, or a meeting for coffee or lunch, is usually achievable.

Three Stages of Informational Interviewing

I identify three phases of progress in your informational interviewing efforts. In the first phase, you’re learning about firms, industries, and people, you’re expanding your own network, and you’re iterating meetings with the goal of getting in front of the decision maker who can help you out - usually a hiring manager.

In the second phase, you’re enhancing support for your efforts within the target firm. In this phase, you walk a fine line. You don’t want to appear like a chiseling politician, but you do need to meet people and get them to like you enough to put your application over the top.

In the third phase, you’re using info meetings to grow within your employer - or to engineer your transition away from your employer. It’s the circle of life.

Making Info Meetings Work

There are four steps to bring this all together. Above all, you must genuinely care about your interview partner. Using people as a means to an end is the surest way to get $*&%listed I know. And if you do this, you’ll deserve whatever you get. People can smell manipulation, and you’ll feel like a slimeball. Don’t take selfish advantage of people. In business, it’s always a small world.

Next, you need to plan the meeting well. This is the part where you use wisdom to craft an interesting agenda for the meeting.

Then, bring your communication skills to bear, before, during, and after the meeting as you put yourself in your interview partner’s shoes, and follow up in an appropriate way from the meeting.

Substantiating Claims from the Opening Paragraph

If you think this article’s teaser is over-the-top, let me clarify my claims. Informational interviewing is a super power because although anyone can do it, few people utilize this skill. Informational interviewing, which comes down to having meaningful conversations with people you want to know better, is a differentiator in the working world.

Informational interviewing can add tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars (or even more) to your lifetime earnings by supporting rapid career progress within your current employer, or helping you transition to better paying work elsewhere. It can help you get clients if you become an entrepreneur.

Informational interviewing enriches your life and the lives of others as you deepen human relationships. The Work Pants Finance project is committed to learning from the experiences of others, and helping you make a financial plan that works as hard as you do. Few topics overlap those goals as neatly as informational interviewing.

Informational interviewing increases joy in your daily work because the meetings themselves are a pleasure and provide variety in a work day, and because if info meetings are used to pave the way for a desirable transition, your new job should improve your work life too.

Informational interviewing requires targeting conversations with specific people you want to know better - and info meetings usually take place between the hours of 7 am and 6 pm, letting you get home for supper with your family. Contrast this with generalized "networking events” where you meet folks more or less at random, many of whom have agendas that don’t overlap with your own, and which are usually held from 6 pm to 9 pm.

Resources

The articles below are my go-to’s for detailed teaching on this important skill - dig in!

• Harvard Business Review: How to Get the Most Out of an Informational Interview

• UC Berkeley blog post: Informational Interviewing

• The Muse: How to Ask for a Job—Without Asking for a Job

• The Muse: How to Get Important People to Read and Respond to Your Emails

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Matt Miner: Work is hard. Doing work is hard. Adam and Eve screwed up cosmically and God decreed, "By the sweat of your face, you shall eat bread, all the days of your life." Genesis 3:19. If doing work makes us sweat, then sometimes getting work is downright exhausting, especially early in your career or when faced with an unanticipated transition.

Hey, and welcome to the Work Pants Finance podcast. I'm so glad you're here. I'm Matt Miner, your money guide. Work Pants Finance is the show for MBAs, entrepreneurs, and other professionals who want their financial plan to work as hard as they do.

In last week's episode, we talked about life, work, values, and goals with the legendary Mary Beck White-Sutton from Duke's Fuqua School of Business. Now, I want you to think back to a time that you needed a job, whether your first job in high school, a college job, your first real job, shiny bachelor's degree in hand, your first big job, one paying low six figures, and your first couple of promotions after that. These are all exciting times in your career, but making the job thing happen can be downright terrifying too, especially if the transition was someone else's idea or you're recovering from an entrepreneurial project that didn't work out.

What if there was a tool and a process that was always available in transition, could reduce uncertainty, and pave the way for the first couple decades of your working life? That'd be pretty sweet, right? Today's show is about the best technique to use when you're coming out of school, when you're faced with a transition, or when you're looking to grow in your current firm, especially during the period when you're mainly broadening your experience and hunting your first few promotions.

Now, if you're already a senior executive, today's show covers stuff that's in the rearview mirror on your career journey. Still, there are members of your team in your extended network who need this wisdom. If you share this show with them, you don't have to write it all in another email or repeat the same learnings in your next one on one. In fact, you could make listening to today's episode pre-work for the next person who wants to sit down and pick your brain a little bit.

Be sure to stick around until the end of the show when I cover a few pitfalls of informational interviewing, and tease a future show, the date is TBA on that one, that will discuss career growth for professionals who are further down the track. I'll also share a behind-the-scenes comment about the connection of today's show topic and the Work Pants Finance podcast.

Now, here's your money guide quick tip. Put today's show into action while it's still fresh in your mind. Schedule a meeting with someone you'd like to get to know better. Consider how to approach them and how to get a time and a Zoom call on the calendar. You'll learn something new and deepen a relationship with a person. What's not to like?

Getting the work thing right is a puzzle. The people you need to talk to don't take your calls. It's difficult to surprise them at the office, especially during a pandemic, and even in normal times, if they ever come again, hiding in the shrubbery and jumping out to greet hiring managers won't help your cause and neither will chasing them down at their homes. According to CORA, basic jobs like assistant manager at a local business receive something like 50 to 60 applications when those jobs get posted online. Hot jobs with hot firms, marketing at Apple, data science at Google, or battery research at Tesla may have 1000 to 2000 people applying for each job. These odds are ever not in your favor.

What should you do? Well, there are a couple of answers. One recommendation is to go into business for yourself and sell your products or services directly to people who value them. This is what we're teaching our children to do, but it's not what I did, at least, for the first half of my career. The second recommendation, if you do want a boss to sign your paychecks, is to master the art of the informational interview to stack these probabilities in your favor. The info interview or info meeting is the subject of today's show.

Informational interview is a secret hiding in plain sight. The search for the term informational interview yields three excellent articles on the subject from UC Berkeley, The Harvard Business Review, and themuse.com. These are not exactly obscure publishers. Nevertheless, I'm regularly shocked when I asked clients or acquaintances the question, "Are you familiar with informational interviewing?" I get a blank stare in return.

First, let's define the informational interview. An informational interview is a meeting with an acquaintance or a member of your extended network for the purpose of learning from them, or for deepening your relationship with them. If all goes well, expanding your network to include members of your conversation partners network too. The goal is not to land a job, although anything's possible. Instead, the goal is learning, learning about the person, learning about their firm, and learning how they may be willing to introduce you to other people in their network.

Let's talk about, why. Why would you want to use this informational interviewing tool? First, informational interviews are much easier to get than job interviews. Asking for a job, a big six-figure professional job is a huge deal. This is a job that vaults you into the top 15% of US earners and the top 1% of earners globally. They do not hand these things out as samples at Costco, you can't buy them on Amazon, and they are not available to be downloaded from the App Store. In an info meeting, you are not asking for a six-figure job, you're just asking for 15 minutes to an hour of someone's time. It's not a small request, it needs to be treated respectfully, but it has a lot less big of an ask than a request for a job or even a request for a direct introduction to a hiring manager.

Second, informational interviews multiply your network maybe by a factor of 300. Here's how. If you're savvy enough to be listening to podcasts about informational interviewing, you probably already know at least 300 people, and those people also know 300 people. Taking into account your network and your network's network, there are now 90,000 people to whom you can be personally introduced, and in that group is just the right hiring manager for you. You just don't know who they are yet.

Thank you to each of you who've taken time to get in touch by email, text, social media, or via a podcast review. It means the world to me, especially in the early days of this project. If you take action on today's money guide quick tip, scheduling an informational meeting of your own, shoot me an email at matt@workpantsfinance.com and tell me about it. I may use your story as part of a future show.

I think there are three stages in an informational interviewing journey. In the first stage, it's all about learning, building your network, and ultimately, getting in front of a hiring manager for your ideal job. In the second stage, you're seeking to generate support for your application within a target firm. Then, finally, in the third stage, you're trying to grow your career within your firm or outside of it.

In that first stage, goal one is learning. In that learning, you're learning about the firm, you're learning about the industry, and you're learning about the person with whom you're having the meeting. Secondly, in that first stage, you're building out your network. You're trying to take someone who has a relatively remote acquaintance and turn them into someone who is willing to take action on your behalf, preferably, connecting you to other people within their network that move you one or more steps closer to your goal for the informational interviewing process. Then, that goal in the informational interviewing process is that third part of this first stage, getting in front of the right hiring manager.

Now, sometimes, this happens serendipitously through informational interviewing. You just find yourself having a conversation with someone who has a job that is a good fit even though you may not have known that when you began the info meeting. The more likely course is that the person in the info meeting networks you to a possible hiring manager. That's the first stage of your informational interviewing plan.

The second stage is when you identify the target firm and a target job. What you're trying to do here is increase your internal support to be offered the job. Now, of course, you can take this too far by seeming too political, but if you build familiarity with your candidacy within the firm, without being a weasel, you'll give yourself a leg up on getting the job. Back when I was in business school, now 10-plus years ago, my student colleagues who were seeking jobs in the investment banking area were constantly traveling to New York to meet with people but really to be known by these firms for whom they were seeking to go to work.

When I was looking at my post-business school job, I flew myself up to the Midwest and met with a number of potential hiring managers just to continue to evaluate the company from my point of view, but also, to create future advocates for myself within that firm. Let me talk a little bit more about that. You are seeking people who want to support your application and who are your allies within the target firm. You want them to care about you.

You have to remember that, to the extent, desirable jobs are even posted. They're often posted to comply with internal policies or regulatory requirements. The hiring managers already know who they want to hire. The key for you is to become one of the people that the hiring manager already wants on her team, rather than one of the people on the outside looking in, applying to a job that's only posted on the internet to satisfy HR or government bureaucrats.

Now, finally, this third stage in your informational interviewing plan. Once you're inside the firm, you keep on doing info meetings throughout your career because this is how you grow, and how you build relationships over time. Now, as you work on your informational interviewing process, you always need to keep your interview partner's perspective front and center. They want to get to know you, and they want to decide if you're a safe person to have in their network and to introduce to others.

How would you demonstrate that you're a safe person? You're going to demonstrate that you're a safe person by how excellently you execute the four steps that I'm going to tee up for you here in the informational interview process. Here they are. First, you've got to be genuinely interested in your meeting partner and you need to let that interest in the person shape the content of the meeting. Second, you need to plan the meeting well. Third, you need to manage all aspects of communication like a winner. Finally, you need to follow-up appropriately.

Here is how you care about the person that you're meeting with. You meet with people that you genuinely want to meet with. If you're just flat-out not interested in the person, don't meet with them. Don't try to use someone as a means to an end or a bridge to meet with the person that you genuinely want to meet with. This will always blow up in your face. Instead, seek info meetings with people you would like to know, whatever the immediate result may be.

This principle also translates to the questions you ask. You need to ask questions with answers that you would really like to know, and they need to be answers that can't be googled, and they need to be answers that connect appropriately with the person you're meeting with. Sometimes, in info meetings with me, my interlocutor would ask me questions about our recent financial report. Of course, since I was focused on strategy and marketing, this showed that they hadn't put a lot of thought into their plan for interacting with me. It didn't reflect really well on them, in my opinion.

Planning relates to how you approach people. The best way is via an introduction from a mutual connection. If that's not possible, there are also ways to make a cold approach. You can do some googling on how to do that. The communication part is how you schedule the meeting, how you tee up the agenda, and how well you conduct yourself in the meeting. Your prepared questions should be quality, open-ended questions that you really care about.

Remember, the marketing axiom to be memorable, but of course, you need to be memorable within the bounds of acceptable behavior for the business culture with which you are interacting. This is just one more way that you signal whether you belong or not. The best way to be memorable is probably to be uniquely interested in the business and in the person with whom you're sharing the conversation.

Now, unless the meeting was a train wreck and especially if the meeting has gone really well, before you wrap up, you need to remember this part of the agenda. "Based on our conversation today," you say, "Is there anyone else you recommend I meet?" When they say, "Yes," you ask them to make the introduction and you start this info interview process all over again. If they say, "I'm not sure," or, "I have to think about it," then, you just politely say, "Well, if someone comes to mind, I would really appreciate the connection." If they say, "No," the meeting probably did not go as well as you thought.

Now, when it comes to follow-up, your follow-up should be considerate, it should be excellent, and it should be prompt. This pretty much means a good email. That email should be short, punchy, well-written, should briefly recap one or two specific things from the info meeting that hit home for you. If you have some way to signal that you get the culture, that's good.

If your conversation partner has made a recommendation to read a book or an article, listen to a podcast, go ahead and order the book, read the article, or listen to the podcast, and then, share what you've gleaned from the recommended resource. Now, a handwritten thank you note probably doesn't hurt, but it's not a substitute for the email because the thank you note takes so long to get there, usually over a week. The email should be sent either later the same day as the informational meeting or early the following morning.

Now, there are a few pitfalls to avoid when you're going through the informational interviewing process. One, we've touched on already, which is asking questions that are not well-suited to your conversation partner. When you do that, it shows sloppiness on your part and lack of care. Not following up after the meeting will greatly reduce the value of the meeting, and if your name comes to your conversation partner's attention and some other connection, they may have a negative feeling about you.

Then, something that never works and never helps is parents who try to do the heavy lifting for their children when it comes to informational meetings. Parents can make an introduction, but once that introduction or email connection is made, the child, who's usually an adult in their 20s, needs to go ahead and grab the bull by the horns, take the conversation from there.

It's been coming out through this podcast but info meetings are the most valuable in transition times, towards the end of a university or grad school program, or when you're seeking to change jobs or change firms or change industries. They have a role throughout your career, though the farther you advance in your career, the more info meetings you'll take rather than request. Sometime, I'll do a show on the transition from manager to director, and then to VP, SVP, member of the management committee, and if I can swing it, public company CEO. That show will feature people other than me since I quit the corporate race in favor of a fitness run on Singletrack.

Now, there's a connection between informational interviewing and the Work Pants Finance show. Podcast interviews are really just recorded informational meetings. I invite guests on whom I admire and want to learn from and who have interesting stories and wisdom to share. There's two more takeaways for you. The first is, like my investing philosophy, when it comes to informational interviewing, I eat my own cooking.

The second is, you can take today's show content and generalize it to all kinds of other projects in your life. Are you in sales? Conduct info meetings with your customers and prospects. Are you a hunter looking for access to more land? Try info meetings, so landowners. Are you a homeowner seeking to change your HOA? Maybe you want chickens. Maybe you want your neighbors to not have chickens. Try an information meeting with the board. How about a parishioner with questions or concerns about your church? You can have an info meeting with the pastor or the board.

The list goes on. Navigate over to LinkedIn or open up your email and take 10 minutes to schedule an info meeting. You never know where these things are going to lead. Informational interviewing is a tool in your toolbox and one you'll want to keep handy. Informational meetings are a catalyst for the changes you want in your life if those changes depend on the action of other people, which they often do.

Now, here are the takeaways from today's show. Info meeting stack the odds in your favor. I read somewhere that applicants who use this strategy have something like a one in seven chance of getting the job compared to those blind applications at 1 in 50 to 1 in 2000. Also, an informational interview is a much smaller ask, a smaller request, so it's easier to get than a job interview. It also multiplies the size of your network. Finally, you need to create a process and a plan for your info interviews. Then, as you gain experience with this skill, you can tweak the plan as you go along.

With that, thank you so much for being here. Without you listening, I'm just singing in the shower. If you'd like to follow-up, click through to today's blog post for links to the articles I share with clients and people in my network who approached me on the subject of informational interviewing. If you want to talk about your career as part of your financial plan, go to workpantsfinance.com and click start here. Next week's show tackles buying and selling a home and features Raleigh-based broker, Steven Squires. Residential real estate is a hot ticket right now and you won't want to miss our conversation or my solo show that follows on real estate as part of your financial plan. Until then, this is Matt Miner, encouraging you to plan to fund the life you love.

[00:17:24] Announcer: Matt Miner is a fee-only, fiduciary financial advisor and Founder & CEO of Miner Wealth Management, a North Carolina Registered Investment Advisor where Matt provides personalized, unconflicted, advice to clients for a fee. He’s also my dad, so please be nice when you talk to him! Matt is a Certified Financial Planner Professional and holds a Series 65 securities license. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Finance from Arizona State University, and his MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

Work Pants Finance is Matt's financial media business where he talks about work, entrepreneurship, kids and money, taxes, investing, and other personal finance topics. WorkPantsFinance.com exists to share wisdom and provide general financial information. It is not financial, tax, or legal advice. You are an individual and probably need personal advice for your specific situation. You should consider building relationships with helpful, caring, and competent professionals who understand your unique context and can provide advice that is tailored to your needs

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