One of the most effective tasks job seekers can do is build their network, starting with people you know or work with (or have worked with) or even people you’ve talked to casually at conferences or on the sidelines of a sports game. 

While you can get job leads and recommendations from your network, it’s also a fantastic way to build your professional knowledge. Whether you’re swapping ideas about common challenges you’re facing or learning more about a field, your network can provide intel you won’t see elsewhere. 

In today’s post, I’m sharing an additional way that your network can help: by helping you diagnose and solve specific challenges you’re facing in your job search. 

Informational interviews are generally considered a tactic for exploring a different career, either before you decide whether to pursue it or as you’re in the process of networking and applying to jobs.

And, while that’s a great use of informational interviews, it’s also very narrow. 

Informational interviews can also be used to diagnose and solve challenges in your job search, helping you go beyond the surface level problems you’re experiencing in a job search to find game-changing perspectives you can use to make specific, strategic changes. 

For example, let’s say you’re a career pivoter struggling to tailor your resume for a specific type of job and you feel like you’re describing your current day rather than tapping into the day-to-day tasks you’ll need in a future career. Typical advice encourages you to explore the role, launching the interview with a broad question like, “what’s the rest of your day look like?” But this approach gives you general information. Instead, you can ask a more specific question that will give you language and alignments to revise bullet points you aren’t sure about: ‘When you’re doing needs assessments, what does that process look like compared to how I assess student learning gaps in my classroom?’ 

But what if you’re already in instructional design and struggling with interview questions about selecting various adult learning methodologies? In an informational interview, you could ask someone what their process is for choosing one methodology over another and how they prepare for pushback. As you listen to their answer, you’d evaluate how they’re answering the question you’ve been getting so often. You’ll likely realize your struggle is not with the methodologies themselves but that you need these stronger positioning statements. 

When you use informational interviews as a diagnostic tool, you’re able to get expert advice on the issues that will most likely help move the needle on your job search. You’ll come away from the interview with more than just information: you’ll be able to make a specific change to how you’re applying to jobs. 

The Remainder of this article is for Paid Subscribers. You can subscribe here and access the newsletter archive as well as find jobs at hundreds of remote edtech/ed adjacent companies.