Have you ever had a great informational interview with someone and then not known what to do next? I think these points of etiquette are especially tricky now, because some of us (including me!) have forgotten a bit of how to people. So if you’re wondering about next steps after an info interview, here you go:
- Be sure to follow up with the person you spoke with. If the person has been especially helpful or you want to stay front-of-mind, you can send a small token of thanks, like the list below.
- In your follow-ups, you may also remind your connections about any info they offered to share with you, from other people to resources: “Thank you again for talking with me on Tuesday. I really enjoyed it, and think this career might be a great fit for me. When we talked, you mentioned that you would find contact information for your former colleague Sally, and I wondered if you’d had a chance to do that yet.”
- You can follow up a couple times if you don’t hear back. I recommend an immediate note after your info interview, mostly thanking the person and sending a token of thanks when appropriate, plus a request for info like above. If you don’t hear back for a week or so, send another follow-up and then a third a week after that.
- In your third follow-up, you can say something like, “I recognize that you must be very busy, so if you don’t have time to follow up with me, I completely understand, and I thank you for sharing your time with me at the initial session.”
- Keep track of your connections! Make note of who you talked to and when, what that person offered, and how you felt about the whole thing. You can also capture things like who the person offered to introduce you to, or what resources they said they’d send.
- Stay in touch. You can connect with your new acquaintances on LinkedIn, and you can periodically send brief emails. Don’t feel like this has to be frequent. I keep a list of people to touch base with every 2 months or so. You can also update your contacts about where you are in your job-search, and keep yourself front-of-mind, as well as check to see how your connections are doing.
- When it feels appropriate, write recommendations on LinkedIn for people who are helpful to your search. These can be sort if that feels right, but when you say specific glowing things about a person, you can make that person’s day—and also remind them how much they enjoyed talking with you!
- Plan to pay it forward. Info interviews can feel a little like asking a lot of people for favors, so if you keep it in mind that you’ll be in the interviewee seat in the future, it can help you feel like you’re not being a burden. (And you’re not!)
