How to Approach an Informational Interview | JobSearchTV.com
By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
Whether you are trying to make a career change or job change, informational interviews can help you a lot. This is how to approach them.
A few years ago, when I thought of transitioning to coaching from being a headhunter, I conducted a few informational interviews myself, because I want to understand what it was like to be a coach. So I reached out to friends of mine who were doing coaching in the kind of environments or the the kind of coaching I was thinking of doing. I wasn’t sure which version I wanted. So, I spoke to quite a few people and I treated this, like I was a reporter, doing an investigative piece about what it’s like to be a coach. This served me very well, because instead of freaking out and panicking and thinking of myself as doing an informational interview, I kind of thought of myself as a curious person who wanted to learn more.
That’s really the approach to take when you do informational interviews; it’s not going to be a big drawn out process. You may speak to people you know, or don’t know about the kind of career or work or information that you want to gather. But you want to be curious.
In my case, since I was doing a career transition, I want to understand all the things I didn’t know so that this way I could start to, shall we say, eliminate blind spots that I had about what it’d be like to transition from one career to another. I figured out what I learned needed to learn. I figured out what I needed to understand and who I needed to start connecting with, in order to start building a practice.
You’re gonna have your version of this, too, where now that you have answers, you have the ability to take action that’s constructive for you either changing careers or changing jobs. But approach informational interviews, as though you’re a journalist writing a story, not a hit piece, but one where you’re trying to learn what it’s like being someone doing this kind of work, either in this career, or at this particular firm, because you’re interested in joining this firm.
[svp]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7mcbEepXyM[/svp]
Standing Out on an Interview
ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter is a coach who worked as a recruiter for what seems like one hundred years. His work involves career coaching, as well as executive job search coaching, job coaching, and interview coaching. He is the host of “No BS Job Search Advice Radio,” the #1 podcast in iTunes for job search with over 2300 episodes.
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