100 Job Strategies
100 Job Strategies · 16 of 100
"Can I pick your brain?" gets ignored. "Can I interview you for a piece I'm writing?" gets a yes.
In short
Asking senior people for advice puts you in the position of taking something. Asking to interview them for something you are publishing puts them in the position of being an expert, which is flattering, low-risk and easy to say yes to. Do it fifteen times and you have built a network and a portfolio simultaneously.
Two messages arrive for a hiring director.
"Hi, I'm looking for roles in this space and would love to pick your brain about how you got into it — do you have 20 minutes?" Deleted, or answered in three weeks with two sentences.
"I'm writing a piece on how hiring in logistics has changed since the pandemic, and I'm interviewing eight people who run hiring teams. Would you be willing to give me 20 minutes? I'll send you the piece before it goes out." Answered the same afternoon.
Same person. Same twenty minutes. Entirely different request.
The difference is what each message asks the recipient to be.
The first asks them to be a mentor to a stranger. That is an open-ended, unbounded commitment, and it puts the sender in the position of supplicant. Senior people receive these constantly and answering one implies answering all of them.
The second asks them to be an expert on a topic they know well. That is a specific, bounded, faintly flattering request. It has a defined end point, they are the authority in the exchange, and they get something out of it — visibility, a chance to say the thing they keep saying internally, and a piece they can share.
Crucially, the second message also implies you have done work. You have a topic, an angle, other interviewees. That makes you a person with a project rather than a person with a need, and people respond very differently to those two.
The compounding is what makes this strategy rather than a trick. Fifteen interviews gives you fifteen senior contacts who have spent twenty minutes talking to you and have a mild investment in your project. It gives you a published artefact that demonstrates domain knowledge. And it teaches you more about how your industry actually hires than any amount of reading. Several of those conversations end with the interviewee asking what you are looking for — which is a question you never had to ask.
Something specific enough to be interesting and broad enough that fifteen people have views: how hiring has changed, why a practice is disappearing, what a new regulation is doing to the field.
A newsletter, a blog, a professional network post. It does not need an audience to be real, but you must genuinely intend to publish or the framing is dishonest.
Twenty minutes, three or four questions, a named topic and a stated number of interviewees. Vagueness is what makes requests easy to decline.
This removes almost all the perceived risk of speaking to a stranger and is the single most effective line in the message.
Do not spend the call talking about yourself or angling for a job. The credibility of the whole approach depends on the interview being genuine.
Sharing the finished work is a natural second contact. That is the point at which mentioning your own search is entirely normal.
Asking for advice makes you a supplicant. Asking for expertise makes them the authority — and people rarely decline an invitation to be the expert.
Yes. If you use this framing and never publish, you have misrepresented your intentions to people who gave you their time on that basis, and in a small industry that becomes known. The good news is that the bar for publishing is low: a newsletter, a personal blog, a long post on a professional network, or a simple write-up sent to everyone you interviewed all count. What matters is that you genuinely intend to produce something and that you follow through.
That is fine and does not undermine the strategy. The value to your interviewees is mostly in the conversation itself and in being asked, not in traffic — most will never check your readership. The value to you is the relationships, the domain knowledge and the artefact demonstrating you can think about the industry seriously. An audience is a pleasant side effect that sometimes develops over time, not a prerequisite.
Not during the interview itself, which should be genuinely about your questions. The natural moment is when you send the published piece, which is a legitimate second contact and an obvious point to mention what you are looking for. In practice a good proportion of interviewees ask what you do and what you are after during or after the call without any prompting, because they have just spent twenty minutes talking to someone who was interested in their field.
Ten to fifteen is where it starts compounding meaningfully, though the first three or four already teach you a great deal about how your target industry actually works. Below about eight you have conversations rather than a project, and the published piece is thin. Beyond fifteen the marginal returns decline unless you are building something more ambitious. The relationships persist well after the piece is published, which is what makes the effort worthwhile.
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