One of my favorite podcasts is Jeff Pearlman’s Two Writers Slinging Yang, a podcast about writing and journalism. Jeff also writes a Substack called The Yang Slinger.
In it, he usually dives deep into a particular question or issue he’s wrestling with, getting input from his friends and former colleagues in the sportswriting biz.
This week, he wasn’t wrestling with an issue so much as he was looking for help from those same colleagues. (Read it here.) He asked:
This week’s substack topic is a doozie: a friend of mine, just 23 (former student of mine, actually) just got laid off. He called asking me for advice … and I’m honestly running out of answers. So I’m collecting advice for this week’s substack. What would YOU tell him?
Although Jeff didn’t ask for my advice, I’m going to give it, mostly because I like to hear myself talk. It’s the same advice I have given to aspiring entrepreneurs, college students, and job seekers for the last 14 years. I’ve written about it elsewhere in the past, but I think it’s time I plant this flag on my own blog.
Here goes:
The power of Informational Interviews
If you’re looking for a job, stop looking on the job boards. Frankly, the job boards suck. They are literally bad at what they do.
That’s because roughly 85% of jobs come through networking, although 50% of all job applications come through the job boards.
That means 15% of all jobs are filled through job boards. If you batted .150 in baseball, you would have a very short career.
The rest of the jobs — the EIGHTY-FIVE PERCENT — come from professional connections.
- You meet someone at a conference.
- A friend tells you about an opening at their company.
- Your old boss or colleague calls you from their new company.
- A friend of a friend of a friend introduces you to someone they know.
- You had coffee or lunch with someone in the same profession.
It’s these last two that we’re going to focus on. You’re going to interview your way to your next job, and you’re going to do it by having coffee with someone and then with someone else, and then they’ll introduce you to someone else, and on and on.
I learned this from a friend who used this tactic in the 1980s after he moved to Indianapolis from New York. Within three months of informational interviews, he had three job offers and requests for 40 hours/week of freelance work.*
* This is notable because most freelancers usually only hope to work 20 hours a week; the other 20 hours are spent chasing up more work. So set your prices according to a 1,000 hour work year. (Your salary needs ÷ 1,000 = your hourly rate.)
And I’ve used it many times myself, as well as told other people about it. This advice has helped get people job interviews, internships, and brand-new jobs that they never heard about because they never showed up on any job boards.
That’s because 70% of all jobs are never published publicly.
Your job is not to apply for jobs.
Fourteen years ago, I spoke to a job seekers’ support group about informational interviews. Many of them had been searching for a job for many months without luck.
After my talk, one guy stood up and proudly declared, “My current job is to find my next job. I spend 8 hours a day applying on the job boards.” He even seemed a little smug about it.
I did that in 2005 and it was soul killing. After one week of spending four hours a day on the job boards, I was so damn depressed I could barely get out of bed. But the guy was undeterred. He wasn’t going to let the world get him down, he was going to apply and apply and apply.
A year later, I was asked to come back and give the same talk.
You’ll never guess who was still attending the weekly meetings.
When you lose your job, our temptation is to hit the job boards, like our parents, teachers, and guidance counselors all told us to do.
But it’s all bullshit. I mean, sure you can do the job application jitterbug, but the odds are stacked against you.
Our world has changed so much. We communicate differently, we connect differently, we consume media differently, we learn differently. So why the hell would we look jobs the way our parents and grandparents did?
If you’re going to take that path, you might as well apprentice yourself out to a blacksmith or cobbler.
Here’s how to do informational interviews
(First, let me apologize for taking so long to get here. I did not mean to pull that same recipe website bullshit, writing a 4,000-word murder mystery before sharing their Memaw’s tomato sandwich recipe. I’m very sorry!)
So here’s how you do informational interviews.
Step 1: Reach out to someone in your industry, field, or company you want to work for.
Ask them to meet you for coffee or lunch because you want to learn more about their career and how they got there. A Zoom call or phone call will also work.
There is a very good chance these people will want to talk to you because they want to talk about themselves.
If you were to call them and ask about a possible job, I can almost guarantee they will not talk to you.
If you asked if you could do some freelance work for them, they probably won’t want to talk to you.
But if you say, “Can you talk about yourself for an hour and I’ll totally listen to everything you say?” they will scramble to meet you because everyone loves to talk about themselves.
Step 2: Ask them questions.
What did they major in? How did they get their first job? What do they like about it? What do they dislike?
Let them do all the talking. You can intersperse little comments like, “Oh, I hate that, too,” or “I did that once.” But this is not your time to do a lot of talking; this is not your interview, it’s theirs.
If they ask you questions, you can answer. But make sure they do most of the talking.
There’s an old adage that the more someone else talks, the smarter you look. So you want to come away from this looking like a genius.
Step 3: Mute your phone!
And put it in your pocket.
Don’t turn it off because you may need to share something with your interviewee. But don’t keep it out where it can be a distraction. And never, ever take a call.
Step 4: Take careful notes.
Get a notebook and a good pen and take as many notes as you can. Make this your interview notebook and fill it up with people’s great advice, ideas, and stories.
Even if you never look at your notebook again, this makes you look like you’re listening and that this is so important, you don’t want to forget it.
Now, you not only look like a genius, you look like a good listener.
Step 5: When it’s all over, ask these two critical questions.
This is the really important part, so pay attention!
When you’re nearly finished, ask them two questions:
- Do you know anyone else I should talk to?
- Great, can you introduce me to them?
Because you’ve been such a good listener and you seem really smart, they’re going to be happy to introduce you to other people. They’ll say, “Yes, you should talk to my friend, Danielle.”
And then you’re going to ask them to do an email introduction between you and Danielle. (Click here to see how to do a proper email introduction between two people.)
Do NOT let them say, “Just tell Danielle I told you to contact her.”
Because Danielle is not necessarily convinced that your new friend really did tell you to contact her. You could be lying. This could be a trick. Maybe you’re just dropping the friend’s name in the hopes that you can meet with her.
You want to avoid even the slightest appearance of that, which is why you need their introduction.
Step 6: You follow-up first.
Don’t wait for Danielle (or whomever) to contact you first. Once you get that email introduction, follow up with Danielle. Ask them the same questions — “I wanted to learn more about you and your career. Can we meet for coffee?” — and go through the same process: listening, note taking, two critical questions.
Your meeting with Danielle will lead to a meeting with Rosario, which will lead to one with Curt, which will lead to one with Javier, and so on and so on.
Maybe you’ll get lucky and one of them will make two introductions, and now you’ve doubled your productivity.
Along the way, something will happen. Someone will know someone with a job opening. Or they’ll be looking for someone who does what you do. Or they’ll put your résumé on the hiring manager’s desk.
Whatever it is, you will have networked your way into a new job without filling out a single application. You’ll have avoided the job boards, skipped the HR gantlet, or put up with the months of rejections that comes with slogging it out on the job boards and classified ads like our parents and grandparents.
GIVE informational interviews, too
One day, many years from now, you’re going to be sitting at your desk and your email is going to ping (or your intra-cranial implant is going to buzz — I don’t know what the future’s going to bring), some 23-year-old kid is going to ask you to sit down with them over a cup of coffee or Soylent Green or whatever the hell we’re drinking in 2038.
Take that interview. Sit down with that kid. Answer their questions and talk about yourself because this is your moment to shine and share all the cool shit you’ve been doing. They’re going to take notes and they’re not going to talk much, which means they must be really smart.
And when they ask you, you’re going to introduce them to two or three of your colleagues, because you kick ass. And you’re going to help this kid get started on their own career path.
Because someone did it for you and that’s how you ended up having your own awesome career.
Photo credit: Jeff Pearlman’s Substack
Photo credit: Erik Deckers (Hey, that’s me!)
