Stories, target qualities, resumes, and cover letters
- Overall strategy for finding email addresses
- Broadly, who you’ll be looking for
- Choosing specific people
- Finding people’s contact information
Overall strategy for finding email addresses
Now that you’ve found some companies you find interesting, you need to learn more about them.
Informational interviewing is the core of the Unusually Difficult system. But in order to run those important informational interviews, you need people to speak with in the first place.
This highly tactical chapter first covers what sort of people will be most helpful to informationally interview, then goes into detail on how to find those people on LinkedIn, and then finally focuses on the many ways you can try to get someone’s contact information when looking at their LinkedIn profile.
In the chapter after this one, we’ll focus on how to reach out to the people you find in this chapter, so that even if you’ve never met these people before some of them will take the time to do an interview with you.
Broadly, who you’ll be looking for
As we’ll cover in more detail in a later chapter, your goal when informational interviewing people will be a mix of learning valuable information about the company and impressing the person you’re talking with, so that they help recommend you for a job. Luckily, both of these goals are served by finding the same type of person.
Generally, you’ll want to find people that either have the job you’re looking for or work closely with the job you’re looking for. As an example, if you’re looking for a customer support role, in descending order of importance you’d probably want to focus on:
- People that had that role in the past, but left the company in the last year
- People that have that exact customer support role right now
- People that had that role in the past, but moved to other parts of the company
- Account managers at the same company, since they’re supporting customers in a different way
- Salespeople at the company, since they have a lot of potential customer interaction
Don’t underestimate how much you can learn from people that have different job titles but some overlapping goals or responsibilities.
There aren’t too many people I’d recommend you avoid interviewing, but I’d advise some caution reaching out to people who might be your boss or your boss’s boss. This can be a great move, but probably shouldn’t be your first informational interview. You’ll want to talk to at least one other person to get your basic questions about the company answered before speaking with the most important person in deciding if you get hired or not.
Choosing specific people
Assuming you’ll use friends for obvious connections that you already know about, we’ll focus this section on finding people you don’t already know from a social connection or in-person meeting. Because of its high adoption rate at US tech companies, I focus almost entirely on LinkedIn when looking for people to possibly speak with.
You can start off using LinkedIn’s built-in search features, to check out “{COMPANY}” (e.g. “Google”) first to get an idea about whether any of your first-degree connections (people you’re directly connected with) or second-degree connections (people connected to people you’re directly connected with) work there.
For first degree connections, you should almost always talk to them, since even if they have a wildly different job title they’ll be more honest with you because you’ve already met. If you have several shared connections with a second-degree connection, it might be worth adding them to your reachout list, either to get an intro through a friend or to reach out directly, citing your many connections (both types of reachout are discussed in the next chapter).
To round out your list of possible contacts, you can try searching “{COMPANY TITLE}” (e.g. “Google product manager”) for relevant titles. If you’re not getting enough people that way, LinkedIn’s search is sometimes less helpful than Google’s search of LinkedIn, so you can search on Google instead of LinkedIn. Try Googling “{COMPANY} {TITLE} professional profile site:linkedin.com” to see if you get more results.
Please note that LinkedIn and Google might start to think you’re a bot if you do this searching a lot. The only issue I know of here is if you’re on a non-premium LinkedIn account and doing tons of searches, they can limit your search depth temporarily, so you might get only two pages of results for your contacts for a while.
Finding people’s contact information
A quick note on rapidly changing tools
Many of the things in this book don’t change very rapidly. Writing a cold email or conducting an excellent informational interview are skills that you should be able to use both today and in future job searches.
However, many of the tools in this section, which you can use to find someone’s email address more often than not given a LinkedIn profile, change at a very high rate: there are lots of new companies, acquisitions, failures, and legal restrictions on personal data. So in the interest of making sure you have up-to-date information, I’m going to link to my website for the bulk of this content, since especially with new data protection laws like Europe’s GDPR coming into effect, the tools that are useful today might be useless in three months.
Tactics, in priority order, for finding contact information given a LinkedIn profile
- Does their LinkedIn profile show contact information directly? It can be in the summary area (make sure to expand) or in the small, deployable label “See contact info” in the profile header (usually doesn’t list email address unless you are first-degree connections)
- Use a third-party tool to search for email addresses - this is the bulk of the content in this chapter, but shifts quickly. Here’s the link to the latest look I have at useful tools.
- Do you have a friend in common who can introduce you via forwardable introduction? You’ll want to make sure you don’t ask the same person for intros too many times, to prevent your friend from getting annoyed at what you’re asking, and that you’re coming off as extremely professional to the possible interviewee, to prevent your friend from worrying that making the intro will reflect badly on them.
- Does your target contact have a website or blog with contact information? Try Googling a bit.
- Are they at an under-50 person company? Calling or emailing their support team is a bold but useful way of getting in touch, though you’ll have to make a great pitch.
- Can you direct message them on Twitter, or use another social platform like LinkedIn InMail (paid)?
- If all else fails, you might as well try an out-of-the-blue LinkedIn connection request (use sparingly, so that your profile doesn’t get flagged). If you’re at this point on the list you don’t have many better options.
This search for contact information certainly won’t work in all cases, but as of June 2018 had a roughly 50% success rate for my clients and me. Now that you’ve got a way of reaching out, we’ll look at what to say to these people so that they’re willing to take time out of their day and speak with you.