- Hi, Braven fellows. I'm Gaozong. And I'm here to share with you how I use LinkedIn to get informational interviews. You already know that LinkedIn is a great website to find job postings and to share your professional experiences. But I'm here to tell you that it is also the most efficient way to find professionals to do informational interviews with. 

Remember, an informational interview is a conversation that you have with someone in your network to learn more about their job, career path, or the company that they're working at that you might be interested in. These networking conversations are key to getting you one step closer to the job you want. LinkedIn can be used to find professionals who are in different stages of their career in hundreds of fields and industries, including yours. 

For example, let's say I want to work in marketing at YouTube. I want to know what it's like to be in marketing there. And I want to build relationships with professionals in that space. So the first place I go to is LinkedIn. 

First, I'll log into LinkedIn and type in YouTube in the search bar. Then I click into YouTube's company page, which is the first result for my search. On this page, there's a ton of information about YouTube as a company. But I'm most interested in the employees. So I click on that number of employees right above the Follow button. This gives me a list of all the professionals who work at YouTube. 

There are too many people here. And not everyone works in marketing. So I need to narrow down my search. To see all of the filter options, click on the All filters button on the top right. 

If you scroll down, you can see that you are able to filter by location, current and past company, school, industry, language. And at the very bottom, you can even type in keywords to further filter your search. That's what we're going to do now. I'm going to type "marketing" in the Title box and click Show results. Now I have a list of professionals who work at YouTube and who are in marketing. 

I first want to check if I have a first-degree connection, meaning I know that person and we've already connected on LinkedIn. To do that, click on the Connections dropdown, and select 1st. Then click on Show results. I don't have any first-degree connections. So now I'm going to check my second-degree connections. This means I know someone who knows them. And that person could potentially put me in touch with the second-degree connection. 

So I'll go back to where the filter dropdown now says 1st, and select 2nd, then see results. I feel excited that I got a good list of people and start clicking through each person. It looks like McKayla and I went to the same school, and our shared connection is Michael. I feel comfortable reaching out to Michael to ask for a connection. So I'm going to send him an email because I'm not sure how often he uses LinkedIn. 

This is what I would send to him. "Hi Michael. I hope you've been well. I'm looking to learn more about marketing, specifically at YouTube. And I noticed you are connected to McKayla Taaffe on LinkedIn. Would you be willing to connect me to her so that I can learn more about her experience? Thank you! Best, Gaozong." Hopefully, I hear back from Michael and he is open to connecting me with McKayla. Once I get connected, I'll ask her for an informational interview. 

To ensure that I talk to a few people, I'll do the same process with other second-degree connections on the list and maybe even narrow it down to people who went to the same school as me, because I know that will help me build a stronger connection with that person. You can do the same process to get informational interviews for yourself. Your search does not have to start with a company. Let's say you're interested in a specific role. You can type it into the search bar in LinkedIn. Then select people as your search category, and go from there. 

All right. Now you know how to use LinkedIn to get informational interviews. Before we go, I want to highlight two takeaways. One, LinkedIn is a very powerful networking tool. And people expect to be reached out to. So don't be afraid to try your luck. Two, your network is more than the people you personally know. Don't forget to leverage your second- or even third-degree connections to get the informational interview that will help you find the role you want. That's it. Good luck. And you'll do great.