What is the purpose of an informational interview?

My first job after college was as a receptionist at a real estate office. My responsibilities included picking up coffee, making photocopies, and filing paperwork. It was easy and stress-free. Plus, the salary—$36,000—was enough to get by on in 2013 in Seattle. So for a while, I simply enjoyed the break.

Before long, though, I grew restless. The eight-hour days sitting at the front desk grew tedious at first, and then unbearable. Within nine months I knew I urgently needed a new job. The problem was: I had no idea what kind of job. Maybe project management? I liked managing things… Or consulting? That sounded fancy!

When I talk to college graduates about their career explorations, I often tell them they are like deep-sea anglerfish (cute, non-terrifying anglerfish). Like the deep sea anglerfish, they are surrounded by a dark endless ocean. The ocean is the whole economy of jobs, and like the anglerfish with its phosphorescent lamp, the new college graduate can only see this tiny infinitesimal patch of it. If you’re lucky, you’ve been swimming around at a university, primarily interacting with adults who are educators of some sort (coaches, tutors, professors, university administrators). The U.S. spends around 3% of its GDP on education and about 2% of people in the U.S. are teachers, so that’s not a super representative picture of the kinds of things most adults do for work or what the economy cares about.

Okay, so back to the deep-sea angler fish. Here you are, in the middle of the dark, obscure, foreboding ocean, with only your little phosphorescent light to illuminate the space around you. If you want to see more of the ocean, you’re going to literally need to swim over to another bit of the ocean to illuminate what’s there.*

So, how do you do that?

That was my exact dilemma as a 23-year-old real estate receptionist on Capitol Hill Seattle. I’d spent four years practicing Latin declensions, and thrilling to the semiotic contortions of continental philosophy. Sadly the market for historiographers is non-existent. So, how did one set about getting a “real” job?

Fortunately, the answer came via a consultant in my mom’s yoga class. She mentioned my interest in consulting (I truly had no idea what I was talking about!), and he told her to tell me to interview twenty-five consultants and then see where I was at.

It turned out to be life-changingly good advice. I resolved to do it, and steeled myself for a long and arduous interview process. The first step was finding people to interview. I knew I could try combing LinkedIn or alumni networks, but it turned out the simplest solution was simply asking a friend. I had one thirty-year-old friend who had worked for two separate consulting shops in Seattle (as I would later learn, these consulting companies, like many consulting companies, were really just high prices temp agencies, but that’s another story for another time). My friend was more than willing to provide “warm”** introductions to managing directors at both of these organizations.

One of them responded right away, and within a week I was ducking out of work early for a “doctor’s appointment” aka my first informational interview. I dressed nice, and put my game face on because that was really all I had. I don’t remember what the managing director asked me, but I do remember telling him that I was good at communicating and I liked organizing things. By the end of the meeting—and not at all due to any extraordinary performance on my part—I had a job.

This, of course, was a lucky break. Seattle was booming, and consulting firms were making a small fortune providing contingent staff to Microsoft, At&t, and other local tech giants. That managing director wasn’t doing me a favor; he knew he could sell me to his client. I would later find out that he charged Microsoft around $140,000 and paid me $68,000. He made a tidy profit, and I got to be a “V-dash” (meaning contingent) Microsoft employee for a year.

I’m lucky I got lucky on my first try. The experience of getting hired off an informational interview convinced me of the value of informational interviewing. Later, when I moved to New York, I would use the approach again. That beginner's luck didn’t repeat itself, but ultimately the approach got me a job in the advertising department of the New York Times, and later in the newsroom.

Now, when I talk to people who are trying to get a “real” job for the first time, I extoll the virtue of informational interviewing for a couple of reasons. First, I have never encountered a more credible approach to finding one's way in the world of work and jobs. And second, I have had the opportunity to observe some of the most privileged people in the world at work, and they are masters of informational interviewing. They wouldn’t call it that, necessarily, but it is, nevertheless, what they are doing when they navigate their personal and professional network, making connections, finding opportunities, and leveraging social capital for professional and ultimately economic advantage.

It’s always easy to spot the rare pedigreed person who doesn’t know about informational interviewing because they are almost always underperforming their cohort. On the other hand, people from more modest backgrounds who figure out how to use this approach outperform their cohort.

For the most part, though—and this is what really gets my goat—it is people from less privileged backgrounds who don’t know that you can simply e-mail the managing director of a local consulting company (even without a warm introduction) and ask for coffee. If you are young and eager, 95% of the time people will say yes.

Informational interviewing, then, is how you find your way in the world of work. It’s how you figure out what the ocean of possibilities contains. It’s how you get your first, second, third, fourth, and tenth job. It’s how you craft a career that reflects the things you care about. In short, it’s how you survive and thrive in the knowledge economy.

*As it turns out, this metaphor is a complete misunderstanding of anglerfish physiology. I learned about deep-sea angler fish on Planet Earth, and I clearly did not pay very close attention. Apparently, deep sea angler fish don’t need their phosphorescent lamp thing to see, it’s bait to lure fish that they then eat. Maybe if I’d paid more attention in Finding Nemo, I would have understood that.

** A warm introduction is where someone provides an introduction (usually via email) to someone they have a relationship with. These introduction are super valuable because the person on the receiving end almost always respond.