The Career Portfolio Workbook

Feel free to take notes. Writing down what they say usually flat-

ters interviewees. A tape recorder, however, might upset them and

could put a damper on candor. What follows are the specific topics you

will likely need to know.

Try to get a realistic job preview (RJP). Once you’ve covered the

general issues, you can tell the interviewee that you would like to get

as realistic a picture as possible of what it’s like to be in this job/orga-

nization/career. To begin to get a balanced view, you can ask questions

like the following:

“What did you do this past week that you see as typical of a career in

this field?”

“What do you wish you’d known more about before entering this

career?”

“What would you say are the two things that are really great about

this organization and what two things do you wish were different?”

Listen carefully for the real message, then probe with questions like:

“Can you say more about... ?”

You will also want to discount the biases of the person you are in-

terviewing. If this person was recently fired or demoted or is a com-

petitor of the organization you are trying to learn more about, certain

biases are likely to surface, despite the interviewee’s attempts to be ob-

jective.

The goal of an RJP is not to linger on the negatives but to get a bal-

anced picture so that you can make an informed career choice. And

please bear in mind that whatever job you take, you will have to, as the

expression goes,“dig some dirt.”In other words, you will always have to

do some unpleasant things you don’t really want to do, if you hope to be

successful.

One final point about RJPs: Learn as much as you can about the

“culture”of the organizations for which you think you might want to

work. By organizational culture, we mean the often tacit, but never-

theless very real, rules and shared understandings that seem to govern

behavior in a particular organization. You will want to know what sort

of behavior gets rewarded (risk-taking? conservative analysis? team ef-

forts? individual contributions?), and what kind of behavior is frowned

upon, despite what you might read in the promotional literature.

Ask questions that will tell you if the organizations you might

work for are the kinds of places you would like in terms of the “climate”

and “feel”you desire. People’s happiness in their jobs often has a lot to

do with the fact that they are comfortable with the culture of the orga-

nization they are working for. Yet this area is the one where job seek-

ers often do the least due diligence. Many job seekers get so focused on

things like salary and job content that they don’t make a sufficient

effort to find out what the organization is like to work for day in and

day out.

Ask about the P.E.A.K.S. that employers are looking for in candi-

dates. The second major task in the need-to-know stage is to find out

Chapter 4: Using Informational Interviews to Perfect Your Portfolio 55