Coffee chats are underrated.
Informational interviews accelerate career exploration and get your foot in the door through referrals.
👋 Hi! I’m Wei-Ting, a college senior (Business & Computer Science double major) at Minerva Schools and an incoming Associate Product Manager at Uber ‘21.
Break Into Tech 🚀 is a newsletter for college and early-career women in tech. I write about career exploration, recruiting strategies and women in tech events and opportunities, all in the context of my personal experience.
Reach me on Twitter @weitingyp. I’m still building this out, so any feedback at all is welcome.
We’re mid-way through the Spring semester and you might be trying to figure out how to prioritize recruiting efforts and land yourself that summer internship or new grad job.
In this issue, we’ll discuss informational interviews (or informally known as coffee chats). They were the most valuable tactic in landing my APM role at Uber.
Contents
Informational Interviews
Informational interviews for career exploration
Informational interviews for recruiting
Why focus on informational interviews?
Getting started: defining goals and identifying interviewees
Suggested goals
Informational interviews
What are informational interviews?
Informational interviews are opportunities to interview industry professionals or mentors to gather information on a company, a career path, an industry or more. They are usually a 20-minute call or a half to a whole hour of coffee.
Who should I interview?
People you’d like to learn from - and trust me, you can learn from anybody and everyone. Here are some ideas on people you should reach out to:
People whose roles/companies you’re interested in: What do they do in their day to day role? How is the role defined in a specific company or team?
People whose roles are adjacent to the ones you’re interested in: What are their responsibilities at work and how do they collaborate with people in your role?
People who have made decisions you’re making now: How did they decide between academia and industry work? Why did they switch from one role to another?
Informational interviews for career exploration
By learning about others’ career paths, decisions and experiences, you can understand what kind of roles and companies interest you.
For me, I learnt that product management looked different at each company, with some heavy on consumer research and little on technical involvement, and the opposite at other companies. I figured that I wanted to work with a team where PMs have the ability to get their hands dirty in prototyping, and had a metrics and data-driven philosophy.
I was also considering start-ups vs product management. Talking to ex-entrepreneurs who transitioned into product and ex-product managers who transitioned into entrepreneurship helped me understand the trade-offs between the two at the early stages of my career. I decided that the cohort-support, structure and resources of a mid-sized company like Uber can expose me to best practices applicable to future start-up endeavors.
Informational interviews for referrals and recruiting
Beyond career exploration, the relationships built through informational interviews (if conducted sincerely) can be extremely helpful in recruiting.
Firstly, referrals are key to recruiting in tech. Your resume is placed in a separate pile and (in theory) given greater consideration, since an existing employee has put in a good word for you. Leave a humble and enthusiastic impression through your interviews and people might become your willing advocates! I got all of my referrals through informational interviews, and all but one of my referral-backed applications received a call for an interview.
Secondly, your professional network also acts as information hubs. To stand out from other candidates in the recruiting process, you need to demonstrate skills and knowledge of what’s expected in the role. For example, before I dived into my onsite product design interview, I called a product design mentor to discuss how product managers and product designers collaborate and common collaboration pitfalls. During my interview, I made sure to collaborate well with my product designer interviewer to present myself as a likeable teammate.
Why focus on informational interviews?
Optimize the limited time you have.
At earlier stages, informational interviews accelerate career exploration and professional networking at a greater speed than building projects or internships. Since it’s virtually impossible to intern in all possible roles and companies throughout your college career, talking to as many people as you can about their roles, career decisions and companies can give insight into where you should focus.
How much time should I spend on my resume and interviewing skills?
Resume reviews and interview practice are essential to recruiting, and there’s no doubt about that. However, there comes a point where there are diminishing returns to the time you spend on these.
How can you tell when you’re at that point? When the comments you get from resume reviews are mainly stylistic, and you’re confident and succinct enough to speed through an interview under the allotted time (for example, I could finish product cases with depth in 20 minutes, leaving excess time for the interview to discuss and collaborate with me). I got to this point at 3-5 iterations of a resume and ~40 mock interviews.
What about technical projects?
Technical projects will always be important, especially if you’re starting out with no prior internship experience. However, rather than build something complicated and extensive, focus on a simple deliverable with sufficient complexity. For example, a single-page web app with RESTful APIs or database access is enough.
My tip for building projects (and teamwork experience) without expanding too much time: 1) go for hackathons and build an MVP, 2) enroll in college courses with a practicum course project.
It’s all about balance.
That’s not to say informational interviews are all you need, it’s just what I would suggest spending time on for career exploration and that extra edge in recruiting.
Getting started: defining goals and identifying people
Defining goals.
What would you like to gain from informational interviews?
Possible goals:
Getting a referral to your dream company
Figuring out whether a specific role is for you: Do I want to be a computer scientist?
Figuring out whether a specific company is for you: Will I fit in at Uber?
Getting feedback on your project or career goals
Regardless of your goal, remember to be sincere and open-minded about what others have to share with you. While I did strategically approach people from specific companies for referrals, I was able to learn personal insights and get personalized advice - in some cases, I even made a friend!
Identifying contacts.
Who you decide to approach for an informational interview should be strategic. The ideal interviewee:
Is just a few steps ahead: people who are in entry-level roles are likelier to be available and willing to speak to college students.
Has interests, experiences or community in common with yours: people are more likely to help others with a shared identity. If you’ve attended the same college, worked at a company with a strong culture, or are in the same professional group (e.g. Women of Rewriting The Code), definitely highlight that.
A second-degree connection: if you have mutual friends or contacts, have them introduce you so it’s less of a cold outreach. Additionally, a friend’s introduction acts as social proof, encouraging them to invest time in you.
A dormant or past mentor: you can learn a lot from past internship managers or colleagues, especially if they’re willing to be more personal with their advice.
Of course, these are not hard and fast rules. However, I find that they work well as general rules of thumb.
Suggested goals for the week
Here are my suggested next steps for the week ahead:
Define your top 2-3 goals/questions for informational interviews
Identify 2-3 ideal (refer to the criteria above) professional contacts whose brains you’d love to pick
In next week’s issue we’ll discuss continue by discussing how to request for informational interviews, along with some informational interview templates. If you’d like to gain early access to the informational interview templates, do any one of the following:
refer a friend and drop me their email address after they’ve subscribed
leave me feedback or a question about tech recruiting that you’d like me to answer (weitingyp[at]gmail.com)
Until next week, remember that tech needs you as you are.