Informational interviews are awesome networking tools, but they can be hard to get and time consuming. Plus, they can be awkward…it's not comfortable to reach out to strangers. Social media is changing that. In the business world, like in many other areas, social media is breaking down barriers, and changing social dynamics to permit more casual relationships with people you don’t know.
Seize this change, and use it to your advantage by intertwining your job search with your general career exploration— it will advance both your immediate job search and your long-term happiness. To explain why, following are a list of reasons why looking inward can help you succeed outwardly.
1. Your job search today needs to be focused—find a field you like, then dig deep. For while it’s good to have an open mind, not focusing on a particular area keeps you searching at the surface level of many industries. This means that you’re looking at only the most visible opportunities, and thus competing with the maximum amount of other job seekers.
2. Gaining this clarity of career focus takes some introspective work. Figure out what your career goals are: What are your valued skills? What do you like doing? What possibilities does a field offer you, and do your future options look attractive? Putting in legwork upfront to figure out your career preferences helps solidify your focus in a field, stops you from second-guessing your search, and gives you talking points to discuss with future employers. Websites like Inside Jobs and O*net Online are good starting points to figure out what opportunities exist out there for you.
3. Once you have your career focus, look to explore it further through informational interviews. This is where job search and career exploration meet together in a lovely marriage. Informational interviews give you incredible insight into fields, while doubling as invaluable networking opportunities. They allow you to chat with people in the jobs you want, simultaneously feeling out if you will like a job, and connecting you with people who can pass along your name to potential employers.
4. Don’t simply schedule coffee dates with vague acquaintances, however—get online! Put your research to work, and start reaching out to people in your desired fields. Be it Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or other social media sites, there are waves of people actively engaging in online conversations…you just need to join in.
5. This is where you put your research to work: You are focused, driven, have goals and are looking for help to attain them. Helping someone help themselves is a huge call to action. So don’t play a damsel in distress: Instead, chat with people to attain new perspectives on your career path, and see if they can help you figure out how to attain your goals. This is what you do in a traditional informational interview, but enacting this process through social media is a more efficient, casual, and less connection-driven process.
Networking through information interviews is a great job search technique. But you need to take responsibility and shoulder the process if you’re going to be successful. With a little bit legwork and determination on your end, you can locate the field you want, and find the backdoors in—the ones that all the other job seekers out there are currently missing.
