Hi everyone, welcome to my blog! I am Cassandra. I know I don’t introduce myself all the time, I just realized that—so hi, I’m Cassandra!
But welcome to this video. Today we are going to talk about preparing for an informational interview. So, you’ve emailed the person, they have said yes, and now you are going to meet with them.
Before You Meet with Them
There are some things you need to do first.
Decide on Where You’re Meeting
Make sure you look it up. This is going to sound like common sense, but you’d be shocked at how many people don’t do it and how it negatively impacts their experience.
- Check on where that location is.
- Are you meeting them at their office and then walking for coffee?
- Are you meeting them just at their office?
- What’s their parking situation like? Do they have a valet service? Do you have to park in a structure?
- A lot of times, when it’s a structure, most spots are taken up by employees, and if you’re a visitor, you can spend a half-hour looking for a spot.
- Are you meeting them at a coffee shop? If it’s LA, San Francisco, or another big city, is it street parking only? Is street parking in that area terrible and hard to find?
You need to check these things so that you give yourself plenty of time to get to your location. So please, please, please do that ahead of time.
Decide What You’re Going to Wear
Make sure it’s ironed, make sure it’s steamed. Don’t show up in a horribly wrinkled shirt or sweats. That skirt you thought you were going to wear—oh, that’s right, it’s still in the laundry. Figure it out ahead of time.
You don’t have to come dressed super professionally, depending on the industry. For my media, communications, and entertainment people, jeans are totally fine. But there is a difference between jeans with holes in them and flip-flops and some sweatshirt versus nice jeans, a nice top, and nice shoes.
Now, if you are meeting somebody in the finance industry, and you know they’re going to be in a suit, you should be in a suit. Try and match them a little bit. If nothing else, it just shows, “Hey, I cared about this enough to get dressed up. I wanted to present my best self to you.” So make sure you are dressing the part and looking presentable.
Prepare Your Questions Ahead of Time
Write them down in a notebook and bring said notebook and a pen with you.
It drives me crazy how many people show up, even just for coaching appointments with me, and don’t have a pen and paper. You thought you were going to remember everything? You’re not going to remember it all. So please, bring pen and paper.
Do not use your phone. Doing this—looking down, “uh-huh, uh-huh”—you could be taking copious notes on everything I’m saying, but it totally looks like you are disengaged and don’t care. So please, write down your questions ahead of time, put them in a notebook, and bring it with you.
Research the Person
Now, you don’t have to go on a deep dive. You’re not going to write a research paper about them. You don’t want to learn so much that there’s nothing to discover when you meet. But you do need to know something about them.
- Check out their LinkedIn.
- Google news about the company to see if anything has happened recently.
For example, if you wanted to interview someone from United Airlines about a month and a half ago, you would have looked totally weird if you came in and were like, “So just tell me about your job. How’s everything at the company?” It’s like—did you not see the news and all our trouble with kicking passengers off planes and not letting little girls on planes in pants?
If you didn’t see it, go look it up. But think of how strange you would look if you weren’t paying attention to those things.
Make sure you’re doing some skimmed research on the company and on that person. Plus, you might find things you had in common that you didn’t know! Maybe they interned at the same company that you’re interning at now. Maybe they had the same major as you in college. You never know.
So go check their LinkedIn, Google them, check out their social media—see what they’ve been talking about. Then, you’ll have some info for the day of, so you’re prepared and ready to go.
That’s It!
Okay, so that’s it for this video, and I will catch you in the next one. Bye!
