Hi there informational interviewers,

Many months ago I had the immense privilege of interviewing Javiera Cordero. I had seen some of her posts on twitter, and immediately recognized a kindred spirit. Javiera is a self-taught informational interviewer with a deep commitment to showing others the way. I highly recommend following her on Twitter and making use of the many resources she shares there (especially if you are interested in the video game industry!)

You can find Javiera on Twitter (X?), LinkedIn and Notion.

Without further ado, I’d like to share a writeup of our conversation.

Hugs, E

Javiera Cordero did 110 informational interviews to land her dream job!

Javiera Cordero has always been an avid gamer. She played her first video game when she was four years old. Since then she has played upwards of 20 games a year. Despite her enthusiasm for video games, for many years Javiera never really thought about the people making them. And even if she had, she says, she might not have believed that someone like her could get a job in the gaming industry.

That all changed when Javiera discovered the existence of video game conventions. Attending her first-ever convention was like being a kid at Disneyland, she says. She couldn’t believe that so many of her favorite games were present and represented by real people, in booths, who were willing to talk to her about their work and the gaming industry.

The conventions introduced Javiera to the IRL video game community, but it was 110 informational interviews with professionals in the video game community that got her to her first real job interview. Javiera is quick to express appreciation for the many people who shared wisdom, expertise, insight and insider tips along the way. And like any good informational interviewer, she has been working hard to pay it forward. In the last two years Javiera has intensively mentored over thirteen people. She has also compiled a self-serve resource for job seekers to manage their own informational interviewing and job application process:

Javiera graciously shared her story with me a while back, and it’s a real privilege to have the opportunity to relay some of her words here. What follows is a condensed and edited version of my informational interview with her!

You conducted 110 informational interviews with video game producers before you got your first job interview. How did those informational interviews help you get your first job?

Those informational interviews helped me understand how people were talking about video game production so that I could speak in the language that the hiring managers were expecting me to speak in. That kind of reverse engineering to understand expectations is something that most people don't know is possible.

It was also just so helpful to talk to people who had the job that I wanted. They could give me a functional understanding of what their actual work was like.

There’s also this whole other part of this entire strategy, which is about how you as a human being can start to start to occupy some of the mindspace of the people who work in the industry. Having that relational connection means that you are going to be able to have greater visibility into opportunities as they come up.

What kinds of questions did you ask in those interviews?

I interviewed them about what their job was like, what tools they used, what their daily rhythms were, who their stakeholders were, what was their reporting structure like, what are some of the lessons that they'd learned throughout their years of production, and how is production done at their studio versus other studios?

A lot of people are uncomfortable reaching out to ask for an informational interview. Did you ever find it challenging?

Of course, it's very challenging to reach out to people to arrange those conversations to begin with. But, for me, it was the only thing that made a crack in the wall of non-access that I had to the gaming industry.

Lining up the call is the first hurdle of just getting another human being’s full attention for 30 minutes. That's the Herculean effort that most people are not doing. But when they're not doing that, they're operating fully blind. They have no contextual understanding for why that studio is even hiring for that position, or what have been the current challenges or who that role would report to. There's so much contextual information about the role that is important. And informational interviewing is one of the most powerful ways to tap into that knowledge.

Most people aren’t taught the importance of informational interviewing, so how did you figure out this approach?

So a lot of people ask me that. How do you do this? Who taught you? And I’m like, no one. I've had a lot of support from incredibly smart people, both in and out of the game industry along the way, but I'm here because I really fought to be here. The minute that I found out that there was a discipline called video game production, and that it was something I would really be suited to, that gave me more direction to leverage all of the relationships that I had built from attending conventions and participating in the game community to help me start arranging calls with other producers.

The first job you ended up getting wasn’t exactly the job you were expecting to get, can you share more about how that happened?

It just didn't look like I had imagined it looking like. That is why it is so important to broaden your awareness of what's possible. And that's why community is so powerful, because community can help uncover this giant wider world outside of your perspective that you could just not know about.

Did you stay in touch with any of the people you did informational interviews with?

Yes, of the 110 there were five that stuck around who I would meet with bi-weekly. They became my mentors. This group was really helpful when it came time to apply for my first job.

You’ve actively mentored thirteen people! What does your work as a mentor look like? What are you doing with your mentees?

I think people have a lot more power in their hands than they understand; They just have to be organized. My mentorship is often focused around helping my mentees get organized and to start asking better questions so that if they talk to three producers, the questions they're asking in the second and third producers are evolutions of the questions on the first producer or whoever they're speaking

What I’m reading this week…

Notes on Web3 by Robin SloanI work in the Web3 space, but I’m not a big joiner so I love to read what they naysayers say. Very funny, frequently spot on.

And that’s pretty much it… I’ve been too busy to read much this past week… eep! 😱 Please do let me know if you’ve ready anything. My brain is wilting and I need more infotainment to keep it alive and sufficiently saturated with dopamine (thank you ADD!).