My informational interview experience is almost one that I didn’t attend.

When I was first starting out in my career, I applied to a sales job that I’d seen advertised in the paper. This was the 1990s so newspaper ads were still pretty popular.

I got a call from the company I’d applied to and they asked me to attend an informational session for two evenings where they’d discuss the job opportunity with other people who they were also inviting to the session.

It turned out that they were actually hiring for 9 sales people not one, and that they were conducting interviews in a slightly different way than what I was used to.

They had identified 20 different people who interested them and all 20 of us attended the informational interview. It wasn’t an interview per se as for both nights, we just attended and listened to several of the staff members explain the company, the job and what they were looking for. They also spoke about what they offered in return.

Those were interested to continue on in the process were then invited back to actually interview on a one-on-one basis with the hiring managers.

I almost didn’t attend the first session and after the first session, almost decided not to come back for the second one because I was unsure if I wanted a job that involved this style of hiring process and was hiring so many people at once.

Why would a company choose to have an informational session rather than having a more standard interview process?

In the case of this company, they were coming out of bankruptcy under a new owner and had to build up their sales team from scratch. Due to the number of people they needed to hire – nine new sales reps – they felt that it was preferable to start with a larger sample of around 20 people that they identified and inviting them to a session to learn more about the job to start with.

Typically, you’ll probably find that with informational session type interviews that the company is looking to hire numerous staff and that the job more often than not is one that has a high turnover.

That’s why they use the informational interview: they need to hire numerous people – many of whom may only last several months on the job – and the company probably has to conduct these informational type sessions every few months.

Another common trait of jobs that are filled using an informational interview format is that they tend to be commission-based, perhaps commission only. In other words, it really isn’t costing the company anything to hire people – except the cost to train them of course – because the real cost of the job is borne by the person taking the job.

If they don’t make commissions, they don’t get paid.

Some financial services firms that hire for financial advisors use this kind of interview process, too. They invite you to an informational session along with perhaps 10-20 other people, they hope that perhaps half of them will be interested in the job and that they can hire several people from this list.

Again, it’s probably because the job is commission-based, has a high turnover and the job is one that the company needs to fill on an ongoing basis.

In the case of the company I was working for, they held these informational sessions every few months, several times per year. I worked for this company for 18 months – before they went out of business again – and during that time, there were 4 informational sessions that resulted in them hiring 4-5 new sales staff each time.

Before accepting a new job with a company that uses informational interview sessions to hire staff, at least think about the sorts of things I mentioned above, namely why are they using this form of interview, how high is the turnover for the job, and is it a commission-only job?

The last thing you want to do is take a job where they essentially expect that there is a better than average chance that you quit in several months given the nature of the job which of course will result in you having to look for a new job yet again.