How to Have a Professional Conversation
I’m looking for work and instead of a real interview I was offered an “informational interview.” Should I go? How do I prepare for it? Do you have any tips? Strangely I’m nervous even though it’s not even for a real job.
You should go to any interview that you are invited to, because it’s one of the best ways to learn how to have a professional conversation with someone you don’t know. Pretty soon you’ll find out that every interview is a conversation, and every conversation is an interview.
The purpose of any introductory professional conversation is to find the overlap between what someone else wants and what you want. Right now what you want may be limited to a job or a project but once you’re past that, you’re going to be in a lot of situations where you can see how working together with someone is going to work out well for both of you. When, how, or whether you act on that is usually determined by other factors, but if you don’t know how to find that overlap, you’ll miss the opportunity.
If you reach out to work with me, either as a teacher, designer, or client, and you seem like the kind of person I’d want to work with but there’s no immediate need, I will often ask to meet anyway. Why? I want to know what you’re all about, meaning I want to know what motivates you, what you want. In risking my hour — which is worth a lot — I potentially have a lot to gain. I may be looking for someone, or know someone looking for someone, in the coming months, and meeting with you now means being able to pull you in right away instead of mounting a full-on search exactly when I have no time for it. More than that, though, it’s a chance for me to learn about what’s going on out there. I’m not interested in the specific information: I’m looking for patterns across several of these conversations. If you’re new to the field, what are you excited about? What are you anxious about? I don’t know you, so maybe you’ll say something I haven’t considered. And maybe I arranged the meeting thinking you may be a good match for something I know I’ll be looking for soon, but over the course of our time together it turns out you’re a perfect fit for something else.
You have a lot to gain from an informational interview, too. Since you don’t have to spend the time proving your qualifications for a specific job description, you have at least fifteen minutes to ask pretty much anything about design, business, or your future. Instead of meowing on and on about how you really wish you had a mentor, use these moments to get your bearings. Dear successful person I reached out to, what do you look for in a portfolio? Do you think I should pursue work in this area, or is there something else I’m not thinking about? Do you like what you do, and would you recommend it? If I want to eventually do X, do you think it would be better for me to do Y or Z? This is your chance. Don’t blow it.
Now that we have all that out of the way, some tips for your visit:
Ask who you are meeting, and find out who they are. Read until you find out where the individual you’re talking to came from, what their company or practice is about, what the public has to say about them. What’s going on in their industry? What do they hope for? What do they worry about? You don’t need dissertation-level research on any of this, but you should know at least as much as someone who reads the newspaper every day would know. For that matter, if you want to be able to talk to anyone, read the newspaper every day.
Don’t make someone crazy before you even meet. If someone asks you if you can meet Thursday at 3pm, do not under any circumstances reply “I’m busy Thursday,” and hit send. It’s your job to make it easy by suggesting alternatives after the time they proposed: “Unfortunately I have a conflict Thursday. Could we please meet the same time Friday or Monday?” After you agree on a time, confirm the meeting by sending a calendar invitation, and confirm it again by email the morning of or the night before. If you’re not sure if you should bring your portfolio, ask. Your interviewer committed a half hour or hour of their time, not that plus an additional two hours to schedule the meeting.
Do not send them a LinkedIn invitation. Or friend them on Facebook. Or dump hearts on their Twitter feed. Please.
Know what you want. Maybe what you want is help figuring out what you want. That’s okay, too. But if what you want is freelance work, a full-time job, a side gig, a teaching gig, your own company, a hobby, or a way into a particular sector, figure that out ahead of time, and say so when asked. So many times I’ll talk to people who are so focused on looking like they’ve got it together that they’ll forget to say what they want.
Wasting someone’s time is a cardinal sin. Being late is out of the question: it means starting with an apology or a commuting story. If you’re meeting at another location, like a coffee shop, go ten minutes early, so that you’re already sitting with your coffee instead of spending ten minutes in awkward conversation in line. If you’re meeting at their office, don’t be more than five minutes early. When you see your interviewer, be the first to say hello and smile and extend your hand, and start by thanking them for their time. Bring a printed copy of your resume and hand it to your interviewer. It’ll help that person remember who you are and what your name is, especially if this is their fourth meeting of the day. Don’t bring a pop-up business card, or a DVD with your name scrawled on it, or a thumb drive for any reason.
If they invited you, let the other person lead. But don’t be a dishrag. If you were showing someone your apartment, you wouldn’t just stand there and stare. You’d ask some questions about what they would like to see, and then take it from there. In each room, you would gauge how long they want to be there, and then look for cues for when it’s time to lead them into the next space. So for an informational interview, after greetings are exchanged, ask them: would you like to see some of my work? Would you like to go through it or would you like me to go through it? Where would you like to start? As you’re talking, check for cues. Is your interviewer getting restless? At what point does their attention flag? What questions are they asking as you go? These are all good things to pick up for the next time.
Ask questions that uncover overlaps. This is where your research comes in. Maybe you suspect a similar feeling towards something, or a similar outlook. Maybe you see a need that you can fulfill. Asking about these things is how you discover if you were right or not. If you find the overlap, you’ll spend the majority of the time talking about it, and not about you. And focus on the overlaps: you’re not looking for a soulmate. The rest of them can be different, and not intersect with you at all. Besides, you already know what you think.
Be interested. And if you are interested, look interested. Nothing is more stifling than a person who has zero curiosity. Young people tend to show no affect when listening or speaking, habitually looking as neutral or nonplussed as much as possible. Older people tend to interpret this as disinterest or disgust. If something interests you, make eye contact, gesture, nod, or use words to show you’re interested. At the very least, remind yourself that you like this person because they are taking the time to meet with you. They may as well have handed you a hundred-dollar bill.
Look for cues that the meeting is over. Looking at a watch or phone, summarizing the points of the meeting, telling you about a subsequent meeting, telling you that time’s up, and standing up are all ways for someone to say that the meeting is over. This is when you thank the person for their time with you, and for what they’ve shared with you.
Send a follow-up thank you note. Do this as you would for any other interview, no more than 24 hours afterward, and in email. Recap the meeting, restating what you want and what you can offer. If you would like to work with this person in the future, say so. If they said something great, quote them. In that next moment of connection, if there is one, they’re going to type your name into their email search field, and this is the note that you want to come up, not the one that says “late 5min sorry.”
A lot of this applies to regular one-on-one interviews as well, but a formal job interview often involves multiple people, making it a more challenging topic for another time. You’re actually as likely to trip into one of these conversations as you are to schedule one, whether at a holiday party or brunch for your boyfriend’s boss’s wife’s birthday. My life is full of these conversations, though now they are about more than just design: everything from real estate to raising kids to being involved in your community means having grown-up conversations that uncover mutual interests. Thankfully, there are a lot of great people out in the world, and you can learn a lot from them. If you also learn how to find what you’re both interested in or how you can help each other, you can do a lot together.
Juliette Cezzar is a designer, educator, and author based in New York City. She is currently the Associate Director of BFA Communication Design at The New School’s Parsons School of Design and President of AIGA/NY. Her most recent book, with Sue Apfelbaum, is Designing the Editorial Experience.
