Informational interview questions to ask (that actually lead to a referral)

You landed the informational interview. Someone at a company you’d love to work for agreed to give you 20 minutes. Now comes the part most people fumble: the informational interview questions to ask that turn a pleasant chat into an actual opportunity. Ask the wrong ones and you get a nice conversation that goes nowhere. Ask the right ones and you walk away with insider knowledge, a warmer relationship, and often a path to a referral you never had to beg for.

The stakes here are higher than they feel. Referrals are one of the most powerful forces in hiring. According to compiled referral-hiring data from Zippia, referred candidates make up only about 7% of applicants but account for 30% to 50% of hires. An informational interview is the most natural on-ramp to becoming one of those referred candidates, and the questions you ask are what determine whether that happens.

Why the questions matter more than the meeting

Most people treat an informational interview as a fact-finding mission: learn about the role, the company, the industry. That’s fine, but it undersells the opportunity. The real goal is to build a relationship with someone who can vouch for you, and relationships are built through the quality of the conversation, not the fact that it happened.

Good questions do three things at once. They show you did your homework, which signals you’re serious. They give the other person a chance to talk about things they actually care about, which makes the conversation enjoyable for them. And they surface information you can’t get from a job posting, like what the team is actually struggling with. A hiring manager or senior employee who enjoys a conversation and comes away impressed is the one who later thinks of you when a role opens up.

The reason this works ties back to the referral data. Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on informal referrals has found that referred hires tend to be better matches and stay longer, which is exactly why companies lean on them. When you ask thoughtful questions, you’re giving the person the evidence they need to feel comfortable putting your name forward. Nobody refers a stranger. They refer someone whose thinking they’ve seen up close.

Questions to open with: their path and their perspective

Start where it’s easy for them to talk and hard for you to sound generic. People like reflecting on their own trajectory, so a good opener invites that without being a softball.

Try questions like: “How did you end up in this role? I’ve noticed people get here from pretty different directions.” Or: “What surprised you most about this team once you were actually inside it?” These work because they’re specific enough to show genuine interest and open enough to let the person go wherever they want. You learn how careers actually get built at this company, which is far more useful than the sanitized version on the careers page.

Avoid opening with anything they’d have to look up or that sounds like you’re interviewing them for a report. “What does your company do?” tells them you didn’t prepare. “What’s a typical day like for you?” is fine but forgettable. The opener sets the tone, so make it something only a real conversation, not a Google search, could answer.

Questions that surface the hidden job market

This is where informational interviews earn their reputation. The roles that never get posted, the needs a team hasn’t formalized yet, the reorganizations coming down the pipe: this is the information that lets you get ahead of a job before it becomes a public competition. You just have to ask about it without sounding like you’re fishing for a job.

The trick is to ask about problems and direction, not openings. “What’s the biggest challenge your team is trying to solve right now?” invites them to describe exactly the kind of gap a new hire might fill. “Where do you see the team growing over the next year?” surfaces future headcount without putting anyone on the spot. “What kind of work is falling through the cracks because nobody has time for it?” is a favorite, because the honest answer often describes an unposted role in everything but name.

When someone tells you their team is drowning in a certain kind of work, you’ve just learned something no job board would ever show you. That’s the hidden job market, and it opens up one honest question at a time. You don’t have to pounce on it in the meeting. You file it away and use it later, when you follow up with something specifically useful.

Questions that set up a referral without asking for one

Here’s the part people get wrong: they either ask for a job outright, which makes the conversation transactional and awkward, or they never signal interest at all and leave the person with no idea how to help. The move is in between. You want to make it easy and natural for them to offer help, without making them feel cornered.

Ask questions that position you as someone worth advocating for. “If someone wanted to be genuinely useful on your team, what would they need to be good at?” tells you exactly what to emphasize, and it plants the idea that you might be that someone. “How does hiring usually happen here? Is it mostly through postings, or do people come in another way?” is a completely reasonable question that also tells you whether a referral is the path in. “Who else would you suggest I talk to?” extends your network and often produces a warm introduction, which is a referral in embryonic form.

That last question deserves special attention, because it’s the single most reliable way to turn one conversation into several. When someone offers a name, follow up in the moment: “Would you feel comfortable introducing us, or is it better if I reach out and mention we spoke?” That gentle nudge converts a vague suggestion into an actual warm intro, and a warm intro from an insider is worth more than fifty cold applications. Each person you talk to can hand you the next one, and a chain of warm introductions is how outsiders quietly become insiders.

Notice that none of these say “will you refer me?” They give the other person the information and the opening to help, and let them choose to. People are far more likely to advocate for someone who made helping them feel like their idea. If the conversation went well and you’ve shown you’d be an asset, the offer to “keep you in mind” or “introduce you to the hiring manager” tends to come on its own. If it doesn’t come up naturally, a well-placed follow-up can nudge it, which is where the after-meeting work matters.

Questions to avoid

A few categories of questions quietly sink informational interviews, and they’re worth naming.

Don’t ask anything you could answer with a two-minute search. Questions about the company’s basic products, its headquarters, or its founding year signal that you didn’t bother to prepare, and they burn time you can’t get back in a 20-minute call. Don’t ask for a job directly, either. “Are there any openings?” turns a relationship-building conversation into a transaction and puts the other person in the uncomfortable position of gatekeeping. And avoid questions that are really just you talking: the long-winded “here’s my whole background, what do you think?” monologue disguised as a question. The person agreed to a conversation, not a pitch.

There’s also a subtle one: don’t ask questions that only serve you. “Can you review my resume?” or “Can you introduce me to your VP?” in a first conversation asks for a lot before you’ve given the person any reason to invest in you. Save the asks for after you’ve built some goodwill. The first meeting is for earning the right to ask later.

How to close, and what happens next

End the conversation by making the next step easy. A simple “This was genuinely helpful, would it be alright if I followed up in a few weeks?” keeps the door open without demanding anything. Then, and this is the part that separates people who get referrals from people who get a nice chat and nothing else, you actually follow up well.

The follow-up is where a single conversation becomes a relationship. A same-day thank-you that references something specific they said, then a light touch a few weeks later sharing something relevant to a problem they mentioned, keeps you on their radar as a real person rather than a name they half-remember. We wrote a full playbook on this in our guide to following up after an informational interview, and it’s worth reading before your next one. Getting the meeting is only half the work. If you haven’t secured the meeting yet, our guide on how to ask for an informational interview covers that step.

The outreach angle

The whole point of asking better informational interview questions is that it turns a passive networking ritual into an active path toward a referral, and referrals are how a large share of jobs actually get filled. The person across the table can become your advocate, but only if the conversation gives them a reason to.

That process starts before the interview, with the outreach that lands the meeting in the first place, and it depends on reaching the right person with a message specific enough to earn a yes. angld.AI automates the research-to-outreach pipeline that makes that happen: it identifies the right person to talk to at a company you care about, researches them, and drafts a personalized message that gets a reply. The informational interview is one of the highest-leverage moves in a job search. Asking the right questions is what turns it into an offer.