What You Can Expect if You Do an Informational Interview With Me

I’ve started doing more informational interviews recently, which should be one of the items on The Hairpin’s When Will You Know That You’ve Made It? checklist. I tend to have a lot of fun doing these, in part because a good portion of the interview involves someone telling me which Billfold articles are their favorites, and in part because I’m the kind of person who, in my past four years of freelancing, launched two different advice columns (Ask a Freelancer and Pitch Fix).

Slate, on the other hand, just ran a piece suggesting that informational interviews were a scam. They’re not about information at all! They’re about job-seeking and networking!

“Informational Interviews” Are a Scam, and Everybody Knows It

Well, of course they are. The most important information being passed along in an informational interview is “what type of background and skills does the person sitting in front of me have?” If it’s someone with a set of clips and a knowledge of the industry and a personality that doesn’t throw up a bunch of red flags, I’ll give that person as much help as I can. If the person has never published a piece in their lives, I’ll offer some suggestions to help them write a successful pitch.

This, by the way, is one of Slate’s arguments against the informational interview: it gives people a leg up, and those people tend to already be wearing Privilege Socks. I have found that to be less true with the people who ask me for career advice—although when I end up meeting people in Seattle instead of offering online advice, I often find myself sitting across the table from someone who looks a lot like me.

Still, I like informational interviews, and I hope the people who ask me to interview get as much out of it as I do. With that in mind, here’s what you can expect if you and I ever do an informational interview together:

1. I will buy both coffee/tea and a donut. I really like donuts. Also, since my apartment is roughly two miles away from everything, I probably walked two miles to get to the interview.
2. I will probably feel like you should buy the coffee since I’m doing you a favor, and you will probably feel like I should buy the coffee since I’m the one with the job, and the best solution here is that we both buy our own coffees. And donuts.
3. I will ask you what type of work you want to be doing. I understand that this is a difficult question, since the two extremes are generally “I don’t care, I just want to start earning some money” and “I want a very specific job that I am in no way qualified for right now.” But it really is much more fun if you answer. Channel your inner Rory Gilmore and tell me you want to be Christine Amanpour. It’ll guide the conversation.
4. I will tell you to stay away from certain types of low-level, content-farmy writing jobs even though I have taken those writing jobs myself. This is how it always goes, in conversations like these. I will hope, aloud, that you solve the initial problems of building a career in a better way than I solved mine. You’ll have to do the actual work of solving them.
5. On the other hand, I will be very frank about the different ways in which I earn money. It isn’t all comedy writing about post-apocalyptic cat societies. I write advertorial, for example. I write a lot of things that aren’t The Billfold. I will suggest that you write a lot of different types of things too, because that’s what worked for me.
6. If you say you aren’t interested in a certain type of writing, or that you’d rather only focus on the work you most want to do, I will secretly judge you and then I will secretly wonder if, of the two of us, you’re the one with the better career plan. And then I will secretly remember that I need to earn money and I had better stick to what works for me. I will do all of this in the time it takes to chew on a bite of donut.
7. I can give you zero jobs. I do not have jobs to give. I can suggest places for you to pitch, and I can suggest job leads I saw on Twitter.
8. If I suggest doing a chat interview or email interview instead, don’t take it personally. There are some weeks where I don’t have time to leave my desk and spend unpaid hours on an informational interview. You’ll get the exact same advice and support regardless, I promise you.

I suspect I will get a slight influx in informational interview requests over the next few days, so let me tell you right now: 1) I’m going on vacation next week and 2) I will respond, though not quite as quickly as you may hope.

What do the rest of you think about informational interviews? Did you go on informational interviews when you started your career? Do you give informational interviews now? What do you think a good informational interview should include?

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