Fill your boots! Finding the people who’ll help you
As a career activist, you know how important it is to carry out informational interviews with people who are in companies you want to work for or in jobs that you want to know more about.
But who should you approach for these conversations?
Filling the pipeline with people who will give you useful information is similar to a sales process. You need to work out who has information that will be useful and who might also eventually lead you to or influence decision makers. In some cases they will be the decision makers themselves.
But you're still not sure about:
• How to work out who might be good to approach
• Where to find them
• Where else they might be lurking
Let's dive in and make this process easy for you.
If you're at the research stage and/or talking to a company who hasn't yet posted a position of interest, ask your existing network for introductions.
"I see you know John Wayne, who works for Ace Company, could you please introduce me via LinkedIn?"
"Do you know anyone who works in Interesting Sector or who works for Ace Company?"
When you've exhausted your network do a keyword search on LinkedIn.
Search for 'Job Title I Want at Ace Company' to start with but let your imagination run wild with the search terms.
You might even just look up Ace Company and see what job titles come up there. One man's HR Director is another man's VP of People.
Not all job titles are the same in each place.
Search terms could include:
• People with roles you want
• Companies you like + roles you want
• Plays on key words for the roles you like
• Hiring mangers to the roles you want + companies you like
What else can you think of?
As you move through these search terms, LinkedIn shows you the people you have in common so this could be another source of people to whom you can be directly introduced.
A word of caution here.
Let's say you find an interesting character, Jim Morrison, and he's linked to your ex colleague Sally Cinnamon, it's best to check with Sally if she does indeed know Jim before you go headlong into, "I see we both know Sally Cinnamon".
This avoids Jim scratching his head wondering who the hell Sally is and why she sent you to him!
Don't just stick to talking to one person in an organisation, speak to as many different people as you can to get information and a feel for what's going on there.
This is where the reach question comes in.
Every informational interview needs to end with, "Who else might I talk to that can help me learn about the Shiny Happy roles you mentioned?", or whatever you need to know more about.
Let's not forget, you might also be carrying out informational interviews when you've seen an interesting role posted.
In this case you'd be reaching out to those I mentioned above but also:
• The role poster - especially if they've stated they're open to questions about the role (they're usually the internal or external recruiter)
• The hiring manager - if you can work out who this is.
I'll be talking more next week about what to say to these people when you reach out to them, to maximise your chances of success.