How to Prepare for an Informational Interview with MANGO [Video]

Successful informational interviews start with the prep work. You’ll want to make sure you have a tailored list of questions for your contact, and that you send them a meeting confirmation email with all of the right details.

If you complete these two steps successfully, you’ll have a fruitful networking conversation that leaves both you and your contact feeling energized.

Create a tailored list of questions for your informational interview

Asking the right questions will ensure both you and your contact get the most out of your informational interview. The MANGO app helps you prepare a conversation outline with questions tailored to what your contact likely knows best.

Let’s do this for my practice contact, Mary Mango. You can access Prepare Questions from the Manage Tasks page’s task list or by clicking Prepare Questions on the side navigation.

MANGO loads a four-part networking conversation outline that works great for conversations lasting from thirty minutes to an hour.

When you load a contact into MANGO, the app will determine which of the four Connection Types your contact is. If you know which Connection Type your contact is, you’ll know what to talk to them about and how they can help you as a networking contact. The outline of informational interview questions MANGO creates for each contact is customized to your contact’s Connection Type.

In this case, Mary’s outline of informational interview questions is for a Connection Type that’s two steps ahead of you—a Guide.

You can learn more about the objective of each section of your informational interview outline by clicking on the blue question marks.

Feel free to use the informational interview questions MANGO has already given you, or click the blue text to edit or add a few more questions of your own.

Reading through the outline of questions for your informational interview helps you get a feel for what to expect during the conversation. When you are done, click Save & Quit to save your work.

Send the perfect meeting confirmation email

The next task is to send a confirmation message for your informational interview. The email should contain all of the essential information in an easy-to-skim format for your contact. MANGO’s Email Builders make writing the perfect networking emails easy.

When you’re sending a meeting confirmation email for an informational interview, you’ll want to include some of your questions for your contact to look over before the meeting. This is easy to do since MANGO pre-populates a few of your questions into the confirmation email so all you need to do is send it. Your contact will appreciate being able to prepare some of their questions in advance.

Come prepared to your informational interview

Now that you’ve prepared a tailored list of questions for your contact and sent a meeting confirmation will all of the right details, you’ve done the prep work for your meeting.

You can review your list of informational interview questions anytime. Click Edit to update your questions, and click Print so you can take a copy of the outline to the conversation. Your contact will feel their time is well spent when you come with a prepared list of questions that’s relevant to them and their experience.