February 17th, 2009, 10 Comments »
Early in my professional career, I did a lot of informational interviews. I did an internship program after university, so that required that I talk to a lot of potential employers. Those conversations focused my mind on what I did and did not want to do in my career.
In the past few years, I’ve been able to return the favour, and answer questions about the worlds of marketing, software and so forth. When possible, I try to make introductions to other folks the interviewer might find helpful. I guess I do an interview every two or three months.
I’ve had enough experience with information interviews, then, to make some recommendations on how to complete a great one.
- Prepare your questions in advance. This forces you to think about the meeting ahead of time, and demonstrates to the interviewee that you respect their time.
- Make your questions as specific as possible. Specific answers are probably more useful than general ones–they’re also easier to answer. If you’re just kicking the tires on a career, then try to get your broad questions answered by other means (books, the web, industry events, and so forth).
- Be friendly and personable. You want to put the other person at ease. If they’re relaxed, they’re likelier to speak frankly, which will prove invaluable in the long run.
- Don’t ask for a job.
- Don’t ask how much the interviewee makes. Again, the internet is your friend for estimating salary ranges.
- Tell your story. You should listen more than you talk, but it’s important that the interviewee gets a sense of who you are.
- Ask what the interviewee loves and hates about their job. These questions, I think, can be particularly illuminating.
- At the end of the interview, always ask “is there somebody else you think I should talk to?” There probably is, and the wider you cast your net, the likelier you are to find the job that best suits you.
- Send a thank-you card. An email is acceptable, but a card is extra classy.
As for being the interviewee, I think the most important thing to do is to be encouraging but honest. If you think the market for blimp pilots is pretty flat, for example, then say so. You’re doing the interviewer a disservice if you just tell them what they want to hear.
I was reminded to write up because my most recent informational interview experience was particularly kick ass (thanks to the interviewer, not me).
10 Comments »
February 18th, 2008, 3 Comments »
About two weeks ago, I was anticipating a painful, tedious search for an apartment in Victoria, BC. In particular, I wasn’t looking forward to trying to rent a place from abroad. We didn’t mind doing it–we rented places in Malta and Morocco sight unseen–but we feared that landlords wouldn’t be down with that.
Thankfully, after only a couple of weeks, we’ve secured a furnished, two bedroom suite in a heritage house in Fairfield. I was somewhat worried about living in a small building, but the owner assured me that every is quiet and pretty much keeps to themselves. The place has a big office upstairs, and a large south-facing deck.
We had to lobby pretty hard to get the place, but I think my aunt sealed the deal. She did an inspection in our place, and talked us up to the owner. We’re taking her out for dinner when we get to Victoria.
And though I bemoaned Craigslist for its crappy interface, that’s where we found this place. So, Darren 0, Craigslist 1.
I put a few photos that the owner took up on Flickr.
3 Comments »
October 11th, 2007, 5 Comments »
I was perusing my HitTail stream o’ referrers this morning (there’s kind of a zen calm watching the river of referrers go by). Right between searches for “saran wrap but ass” and “george stroumboulopoulos is he gay”, I found this search:
allintitle: “in films”
You can probably guess what it’s for, but here’s the official word from Google:
If you start a query with [allintitle:], Google will restrict the results to those with all of the query words in the title. For instance, [allintitle: google search] will return only documents that have both “google” and “search” in the title.
The technical writing is a little ambiguous there. Do they mean the page title, as in the phrase that appears at the top of your browser (and comes from inside the title tags)? Or do they include headings on the page as well?
In any case, I’m not sure how useful this will be, but it’s always handy to learn another search shortcut.
5 Comments »
July 6th, 2007, 1 Comment »
The other day I encountered this unlikely success story from South Korea:
Tapping a South Korean inclination to help one another on the Web has made Naver.com the undisputed leader of Internet search in the country. It handles more than 77 percent of all Web searches originating in South Korea, thanks largely to content generated, free of charge, by people like Park and Cho.
Daum.net, another South Korean search portal, comes in second with a 10.8 percent share, followed by Yahoo’s Korean-language service with 4.4 percent.
77%–those are Google-sized numbers. South Korea seems to be on the bleeding edge of a number of technology trends, thanks to ubiquitious, awesome broadband and, I gather, certain cultural inclinations. They are, I believe, the nation that plays the most hours of online games per capita in the world.
1 Comment »
June 19th, 2007, 2 Comments »
As you may know, Webware has been running this big ‘best of Web 2.0 applications’ competition over the past month or so. Yesterday, they announced the winners.
I was curious to browse through the winners (all 100 of them, which seems a tad excessive), and learn about those I hadn’t heard of before:
- Cha Cha - Human assisted search (you chat with an apparent search expert who helps you find what you’re looking for).
- Gaia Online - Online community and MMPORG for teens. Interestingly, at the moment, they have about two-thirds the number of users online that Second Life does, or did at this time yesterday (21K compared to 35K).
- Stardoll - Dress up avatars–virtual version of the old paper doll kits. Popular, presumably, with the pre-teen and teen girls (and, no doubt, a few adults recapturing the dress-up days of yore).
- Revision3 - Hosts a bunch of online shows, most notably Diggnation.
- PollDaddy - Free polls for your blog or social network profile.
UPDATE: On a unrelated note, here’s 25 more web apps, many of which I hadn’t heard of. I immediately gravitated to BuzzDash and Swivel for the cool charts.
2 Comments »
May 24th, 2007, 3 Comments »
Has anybody else experienced this phenomenon? You’re searching Flickr for a particular random topic, and the ‘Most Interesting’ results inevitably feature multiple shots of a mass of electronic devices, lipstick and cables on somebody’s bed.
It’s the “What’s in Your Bag” problem. My latest example is a search for ‘book club’. Three of the photos on the first page feature photos from the What’s in Your Bag pool. Ironically, none of the front page photos show me what I was looking for–photos of groups of people in a book club.
I gather the “What’s in Your Bag” photos have plenty of text associated with it, and get a lot of traffic (inexplicably, as they’re profoundly dull photographs), and so they tend to permeate Flickr’s search results. I’m tempted to photograph a pair of, say, sheep testacles, and add that to the photo pool. More of a sack, I suppose, but it still applies.
Interestingly (heh), the Interestingness algorithm is a lousy way to actually find photos of a particular subject. Consider the most interesting photos for the search ‘mobile phone’. Three more “What’s in Your Bag” photos, and only a couple photos showing phones (and none particularly clearly).
I was searching for photos of book clubs to prove my point that they’re 90% female. The search results don’t quite support that number, but it’s easily 75%. A search in Google Images bears out similar results.
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