The hardest part of an informational interview isn’t the conversation. It’s the ask. Most job seekers either skip sending the message entirely, or write something so vague — “I’d love to pick your brain sometime!” — that it’s easy to ignore. Knowing how to ask for an informational interview is a specific, learnable skill: who to target, what to say, and how to frame the request so saying yes takes almost no effort.

This matters more than it looks. A study of 20 million LinkedIn users over five years found that weak ties, the people you know slightly rather than your closest contacts, have the strongest effect on job mobility. Your college roommate’s coworker. A former colleague’s colleague. Someone who did the job you want three years ago, just at a different company. Those are the connections worth contacting. But reaching out only works if the message itself is built correctly.

Who to ask for an informational interview

Start with people one step removed from your target role or company, not people already in your inner circle. Your close friends and family already know what you know. Their networks overlap heavily with yours, which is exactly why they’re less useful for surfacing new information or opportunities. The people worth contacting are the ones whose networks look different from yours.

Second-degree LinkedIn connections are a good place to start. These are people connected to your first-degree contacts but not to you directly. LinkedIn’s search filters let you narrow by company, title, and mutual connection, so it’s not hard to find someone doing the job you want at a company you’re targeting.

Alumni from your school work well too. Most university alumni networks, and LinkedIn’s own alumni tool, let you filter by employer and industry. Alumni status is a built-in reason to reach out. It’s a shared credential that makes the message feel less like a cold approach.

Also consider people one step removed from your target role itself. Say you want to break into product management at a mid-size SaaS company. Don’t just target PMs at that exact company. Target PMs at similar companies, former employees who left recently (they tend to talk more freely once they’re out), and people in adjacent roles like product marketing or product ops who work alongside PMs every day.

Don’t overlook former colleagues who changed industries or companies, either. Someone you worked with three jobs ago who now works where you want to be is often an easier ask than a total stranger, because there’s already a shred of shared history to open with.

The research behind this traces back to sociologist Mark Granovetter’s 1973 paper on “the strength of weak ties,” and it got tested at serious scale in 2022. Researchers from MIT, Stanford, Harvard, and LinkedIn ran a five-year randomized experiment on LinkedIn’s “People You May Know” algorithm, adjusting how many weak-tie versus strong-tie connections different users were shown, then published the results in the journal Science. The weakest ties had the greatest impact on job mobility, and the effect was strongest for what the researchers called “moderately weak” ties: connections with roughly 10 mutual contacts. Close ties, by comparison, tend to circulate the same information you already have.

How to find the right person

Part of learning how to ask for an informational interview is knowing who to aim it at before you write a word. Spend 15 minutes finding the right target. A well-aimed request to the right person beats a mass message to five vague acquaintances.

Use LinkedIn’s search bar with specific filters: title, company, school, “2nd” for connection degree. Sort by mutual connections. A shared contact gives you a warm introduction path and a natural line in your message, something like “I saw you’re connected to [name], who I worked with at…”

Company “Alumni” pages on LinkedIn, visible on most company profile pages, show where former employees went next. Useful if you want someone who recently left a company and can speak candidly about it.

And if you do have a mutual connection, ask for a warm introduction before cold-messaging. A two-line intro from a shared contact will outperform a cold LinkedIn message nearly every time. It borrows trust you haven’t earned yet.

The informational interview request email structure

Every informational interview request email that actually works follows roughly the same shape, regardless of channel.

Start with a specific, credible reason for reaching out. Not “I found your profile interesting.” Something concrete: you both went to the same school, you read something they wrote, a mutual connection suggested you talk, or you’re curious about a transition they made — moving from agency to in-house, say, or switching industries entirely.

Then make a clear, narrow ask. Not “Can we connect sometime?” That puts the burden of figuring out what you want on them. Ask for exactly one thing: 15 minutes on a call, or a handful of questions over email if a call feels like too much to ask a stranger.

State the time commitment outright. “15 minutes” is a unit everyone understands, and naming it signals you’ve thought about their time before asking for it. Open-ended requests like “whenever you’re free” create more friction, not less, because now the recipient has to do the scheduling work.

Be specific about the topic, too. “I’d love to hear about your path into data science” is weaker than “I’m trying to understand how you moved from a research role into a product-facing data science role. I’m considering something similar and would value 15 minutes of your take on it.” Specificity signals you’ve done your homework and aren’t asking them to do your thinking for you.

Here’s what that looks like as an actual informational interview request email:

Subject: Question about your move into [role/industry]

Hi [Name],

I noticed you moved from [previous role] into [current role] at [Company]. I’m exploring a similar transition and haven’t found many people who’ve actually made that jump.

Would you have 15 minutes in the next couple of weeks for a quick call? I’d love to ask a few questions about what the shift actually looked like day to day. Happy to work around your schedule, or send questions over email if that’s easier.

Either way, thanks for considering it.

[Your name]

No resume attached. No mention of open roles. No “let me know if you’re hiring.” One ask, made easy to say yes to.

Why “15 minutes of advice” beats “do you have a job for me”

This is the part of how to ask for an informational interview that trips people up most: the framing. Asking for advice and asking for a job land differently in someone’s head. A job request puts the recipient in an evaluative position: now they have to think about whether you’re qualified, whether there’s even a role, and whether recommending you reflects on them. That’s a heavier ask, which is part of why so many “know of any openings?” messages go nowhere.

An advice request puts the recipient in a teaching position instead, and most people find that far easier to say yes to. You’re not asking them to vouch for you. You’re asking them to talk about their own experience, which requires no internal advocacy and no real risk on their end.

There’s also a numbers case for the relationship-first approach over the direct ask. Employee referrals, a decent stand-in for what happens once someone inside a company already knows and trusts a candidate, delivered more than 30% of all hires and 45% of internal hires in 2016, according to data from over 14 million job applications across more than 1,000 companies, compiled by SilkRoad and reported by the Society for Human Resource Management. Worth being precise about what that number measures: it’s referral hiring, not informational interviews specifically. But it points at the same mechanism an informational interview is built to create — a real relationship with someone inside the door, instead of a resume in a pile the hiring manager never sees.

An informational interview is, in effect, a low-stakes first step toward becoming a referral. Nobody refers a stranger. People refer people they’ve actually talked to.

Timing, channel, and what to do if they say no

LinkedIn works well for people you don’t have an email for, especially second-degree connections. Email tends to work better once you have an address; it reads a little more formal and less like a cold DM. If you have a mutual connection, ask them to forward an introduction rather than messaging cold on either channel.

Send requests on weekday mornings, when people are more likely clearing out messages before the day fills up. Avoid Friday afternoons and Mondays before 9am. Both tend to get buried. Give people a two-week window to respond before following up; anything shorter reads as pushy.

If someone says no, or just doesn’t reply, that’s not a verdict on you. People are busy, and a stranger’s request for time is easy to deprioritize even with good intentions. It’s not a reason to stop reaching out to others in that company or field.

If they don’t reply at all, send one polite follow-up after 7-10 days. Keep it short: “Just following up in case this got buried — totally understand if the timing isn’t right.” If there’s still nothing after that, move on. Skip the third message. Two attempts reads as thorough. Three starts to feel like pestering.

Track your outreach as you go, too. Send five informational interview requests, get one response, and it’s tempting to conclude the tactic doesn’t work. Send thirty and get six, and the picture looks different. Volume and follow-through matter more than any single message’s wording.

Informational interviews work best as one piece of a bigger shift away from purely reactive job searching: submitting applications into portals and waiting. The same logic that makes an informational interview request work — a specific person, a specific ask, a low time commitment, a clear reason why — applies just as directly to outreach aimed at hiring managers once you’re ready to apply for a specific role.

The research on weak ties and referral hiring points the same direction. Whether you’re figuring out how to request an informational interview for the first time or your tenth, the people worth reaching out to are rarely your closest contacts, and the messages that work are specific, short, and easy to say yes to. Reaching one hiring manager or industry contact directly, with a message built the way described above, tends to beat adding another application to a pile of 200.

Angld.AI is built around that idea. Paste in a job posting, and it identifies the hiring manager, researches their background, and drafts a personalized outreach message in about 60 seconds — the same specific-ask, low-friction structure that makes an informational interview request work, applied directly to the roles you actually want.