Military Transition - Finding Your Stories for the Job Interview

There was a time in my life when I thought that my journey as a leader began with the Navy. I even frequently tell the story that I didn’t learn all that I should have at the Naval Academy and my real learning as a leader began on my first ship. It is true that that is where my path as an intentional learner of leadership began. But my education as a leader actually began before I could walk or talk. My father ran his own small business as a brick layer for his entire adult life. I don’t ever remember a time when he didn’t have other people working for him. I saw leadership in action from my earliest memories. He never sat me down and said “now I’m going to teach you something about leadership” but in action, he was modeling and teaching me leadership every day of my life.

Upon joining the Navy, my life was profoundly affected by two commanding officers on my first ship, one negatively and one positively. This is what really opened my eyes to the far-reaching effects of leadership on the lives of other people, and not just the people you lead, but also their families and friends. I started my path of intentional leadership learning here. 

As I progressed through the ranks in the Navy and became a leader of leaders, I also became a teacher of leadership because I wanted to make sure that all those I led, both directly and through other leaders, were affected in a positive way as much as I could make possible. Two commanding officer tours and several senior staff tours reinforced within me this need for positive leadership and made it obvious how easy it is to get wrapped up in the business of the day and not place the lives of our people at the center of our focus where it should be.

Upon leaving the Navy and embarking upon a career as a supply chain manager, I quickly realized that the challenges of being a servant leader and building engagement in the workforce are at least as difficult in the corporate world as in uniform. I have seen firsthand people who are excited to come to work and they take ownership, have pride in their work, their workplace, the people they work with, and they go above and beyond to complete the mission of the company. I also have seen the people who have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, dread the day ahead while they are driving in, and hate every minute of the workday when they do arrive. These people are not moving the company ahead and they are frequently working to bring down others to their own level of misery. The biggest cause of both is the managers they work for.

This is why I have a burning passion to first make myself a better leader and also to help others to be better leaders. Solving the problem of engagement also improves both productivity and retention. And that is a direct result of having the right leaders in place doing the right things for their people.

This is my career story which tells why I do leadership speaking, training, and coaching. It connects experiences all the way from early childhood up until today to explain my passion for leadership and helping people to ignite their own passion about being a better leader. This is one of two broad stories that every job seeker should have ready, in addition to several other much more confined and specific stories. 

If you want to land a job, you must convey your passion to the hiring manager, and probably to a recruiter before you are even allowed to interview with a hiring manager. They will almost always set you up to do this in one of several possible ways. They may open the interview with an introduction of themselves including a very brief career history overview and then ask you to introduce yourself. You may get a question like “Tell us about yourself” or “Give us a little of your background.” If not, then at some point you will almost certainly be asked why you are interested in this position. Any of these is the opening you need to tell your career story and convey to the interviewer how everything that has ever happened in your life and career have conspired to make you the perfect candidate for this job at this precise moment in time. But you have to be careful not to make the story too long and lose their interest.

In this career story, you will want to tie a common thread throughout your career path, and maybe even start with something from a childhood interest or something that happened in college. The common theme should be how each of those other things along the way are related to your interest in this job and how experiences there have prepared you to succeed in this job. Find out what the employers is looking for from the job description and show through the story that you have those qualifications (Moore).

As you begin to collect your stories, write out your career story. It will start out much longer and more detailed than the version of my career story that I opened with. Note that I said “version” of my career story, because your career story is not just one all-purpose story. Just like a resume, you will tailor it for whatever purpose you need to use it. If I am selling my leadership training to a company, I will use a version similar to this, but if I were looking for a new job leading a distribution center then I would focus much more on what I have already done in those roles that qualify me for that job. If you start with a very long and detailed “master” version of the story, then you can cut it down for the specific job you are pitching yourself for.

The second general story that you need to have ready is your vision for five years from now. This question will come up in almost every interview in some similar form. Tell me about your vision for five years from now. Where do you see yourself in five years? Where do you expect to be in the next five years? This may sound like to simple question to answer, but you have to be very careful to avoid disqualifying yourself for the job.  Telling the whole truth here can easily make you sound like a risk to the hiring manager, especially if you have aspirations of quick promotions or starting your own business.

Career coach Linda Raynier tells us why employers like to ask this question. First, it lets them assess whether you plan to stick around for the long term. It also allows them to pick out (and disqualify) people who are only looking to get their foot in the door to go do something else instead of actually doing the job that they need done. This is why it is very important to craft a very general answer instead of talking about specific aspirations.

Raynier recommends a two-part approach to answering this question. First, talk about how you plan to immerse yourself in the work of this position to truly become an expert, really get to know the business, and work to make your team a bigger asset to the company. After that, you want to talk about how you will use your knowledge as a master of your role to be a key business partner with other areas and departments to help them and grow the whole business (Raynier).

You will want to spend some time thinking through how to best build this story for the specific industry and job that you are planning to pursue, yet still keep it general as described above. Just as with the career story, write out your story, read it often, edit as necessary, and ask other people to read it. Tell it to your mentors and especially hiring managers that you have connected with and ask for their candid feedback. This will allow you to perfect the story and when asked you will be able to demonstrate that you have put a lot of thought into it and that this is an important focus for you.

You also need to be prepared with stories to respond to much more specific job interview questions. A job interview should not be an interrogation, it should be a conversation. If you treat it as an interrogation, it will feel like one. This is going to stress you out and will probably lead to poor performance on the interview. You can prevent this feeling of interrogation by preparing stories to use in answering every question. Behavioral interview questions beg for a story, but even questions that are designed for a more direct answer can be responded to with a story. You want to demonstrate that you are a good fit in the company and that you have the experience and capability to succeed in the job. A set of stories to paint this picture will allow you to succeed (Turner).

Kat Boogaard, a staff writer for The Muse, tells us that there are six types of stories that you will want to have ready:

1.      When you solved a problem

2.      When you overcame a challenge

3.      When you made a mistake

4.      When you worked as a leader

5.      When you worked with a team

6.      When you did something interesting

That doesn’t mean you should expect to be asked those exact questions but having at least one of each of these types of stories ready will allow you to answer a very broad range of questions that may be asked (Boogaard). 

So, where do you find these stories? Most people would say that they have very boring lives and don’t have any stories that other people would want to hear. In reality, this is far from the truth. Remember that one of the key components of a good story is a protagonist that the listener can relate to. When you are telling these stories from your own life experience, your hiring manager should be able to see him or herself in that same situation. In fact, this hiring manager is probably not too far down the career path ahead of you and so he or she really has experienced situations similar to what you are describing. The best possible outcome is that your listener can truly picture himself or herself in exactly your situation and feel the emotion of the stress you felt when the problem presented itself and then the joy and satisfaction of getting that problem resolved at the end of the story. You can best do that with those very real stories from the life that you feel that people would think are boring!

Where do you find these real life stories? I recommend that you keep a notebook of good situations as they happen so you can refer back to them when you need them. For your military time, you have two great sources where your most impactful stories are already documented: performance evaluations and awards. Their names vary be service and even by paygrade within a service, but performance evaluations by one name or another are a part of life for everyone in the military. These should document your accomplishments throughout your career. You more than likely wrote most of them yourself, or at least framed the story for your reporting senior to wordsmith and put into its final form. The work was mostly done then so they are ready for you to pull out and use now. 

The same thing is true of awards. While an annual evaluation may contain several different accomplishments, all of which could be used as a story for this purpose, the award probably just has one deeper story per citation. However, they really should be your very best stories. If it wasn’t a pretty good story, you wouldn’t have gotten an award for it!

I recommend that you make a paper copy of every evaluation and award that you have ever received. Lay them all out in chronological order. Then start to make notes from each one. If you have been on active duty for a few years, you should have a gold mine of stories here to build your resume and ace the interview questions. Actually write out the entire story from each bullet. You may think you will be able to remember it all when the time comes, but preparation is the key to confidence and you will want to be very confident when you have an interview. Take the time now to properly prepare and it will pay off later.

Of course, you have to comb through all the material you have in front of you and pick out what is useful and what is not. You are looking for reminders of good stories, not just any stories. Remember the STAR format and the parts of a good story discussed in the storytelling chapter. You must introduce a relatable protagonist – that’s you! Next you describe an “inciting event”, the problem that has thrown your life out of balance. You navigate around all the barriers and then arrive successfully at a resolution. The best resolution will be one that can quantify an improvement, a cost savings, an efficiency increase, or some other beneficial impact. Saying that your action improved morale is not really much of any answer, but saying that you implemented a program that increased retention from 87% to 98% will grab the interviewer’s attention!

Some of the material in your evaluation will be difficult to use in creating this type of story. Here is an actual example of a bullet in one of my Navy FITREPs (Fitness Report, which is the Officer and Chief Petty Officer version of an annual performance evaluation for the Navy).

“His participation in Anti-Terrorism/Force Protection boards increased the readiness of all battle group ships.”

This is hard to work with. First, it just sounds boring to even think about, doesn’t it? I sat in some kind of meetings somewhere for some reason that somehow magically made some undefined number of ships better in some completely unquantified way. And it’s all told in words that make no sense whatsoever to anyone who hasn’t worn the uniform. There is just no good story here, not matter how I might try.

Let’s look for some better material. This is another real example of a bullet from one of my FITREPs:

“Fiscal guardian. Always doing more with less. Conducted annual requirements workshop with a worldwide team via phone, email, and VTC, saving over $90k in travel costs.”

This happened seven years ago and when I read these few sentence fragments, the whole story immediately comes to my mind. I can easily recount this story and use it to answer all of Kat Boogard’s six fundamental job interview questions. 

I was working on the staff of the admiral who owned the Navy’s hydrographic survey ships. I led a team of nine people responsible for collecting the hydrographic survey requirements from commanders around the world and building a surveying schedule for those ships for the coming year. This involved liaising with staff members from each of those commanders’ teams in Japan, the Middle East, Europe, Hawaii, and both coasts of the US. In addition, several of my team were dispersed overseas. 

{See how I have introduced myself as the protagonist? And I’m relatable to the hiring manager – small team and a big challenge.}

Since there is a lot of ocean and very few surveying ships to map the bottom, there are always more requirements than resources to get those surveys done. Collecting the requirements and prioritizing them so that my team could build the schedule had traditionally been done by having all the stakeholders fly into a single location for a three-day workshop so all could go through the requirements and collaboratively develop the priority list. This costs about $90k in travel expenses.

In 2012, however, our admiral’s boss cut our budget significantly. The admiral challenged me to reduce our operating expenses. I gathered my local team members and put together a plan to collect all the inputs from each commander via email, develop a first-draft priority list locally, email it to all stakeholders, compile their input, document disagreements between stakeholders along with their reasoning, and then hold a series of video teleconferences to work through the priorities. Since the stakeholders were scattered from Japan to Italy, the time zone differences presented some challenges, so we alternated the VTCs between early morning and late night to try to be as fair as possible to the far-flung audience. After working through the priority list, my local team built the entire survey ship schedule for the year and farmed it out to build consensus. 

{I was presented with several barriers – lack of funding, communication challenges, widely differing time zones – to navigate around.}

Over the course of three weeks, we were able to accomplish all the objectives of the in-person workshop with zero travel cost, saving $90k.

{Ah, we arrived at a great resolution:  mission accomplishment at a big cost savings.}

In this story, I solved a problem, overcame a challenge, worked as a leader, worked with a team, and did something interesting. The only one of the fundamental questions it does not answer is “made a mistake”. If that is the question, I can tell the interviewer that I initially scheduled all the VTC meetings for 8 o’clock in the morning, which made my team and the Italy team (2 pm local) very happy, but our partners in Japan had to come in to work from 9 pm until midnight. After realizing the mistake, I apologized and scheduled the second meeting at night for us, allowing the Japan team to work in the morning.

You should use your evaluations and awards as the basis to put together at least six to eight of these stories that you can use for interviews. While your bullet point accomplishments in the resume should align with each job you’ve had, you should keep your interview stories as current as possible. Don’t go back more than ten years, and keeping them all within five years is even better.

Notes:

1.      Moore, Emily. “Stop Rambling! How to Tell a Concise, Compelling Career Story in an Interview.” Glass Door, August 9, 2018, https://www.glassdoor.com/blog/how-to-tell-a-career-story/.

2.      Raynier, Linda. “Where Do You See Yourself in 5 Years? – Ideal Sample Answer.” Youtube, January 18, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt4TF1wqz9U.

3.      Turner, Joe. “At the Job Interview, Don’t Answer Questions – Tell Stories Instead.” LiveCareer, 2019, https://www.livecareer.com/resources/interviews/questions/tell-stories-job-interview.

4.      Boogaard, Kat. “6 Types of Stories You Should Have on Hand for Job Interviews.” The Muse, 2019, https://www.themuse.com/advice/6-types-of-stories-you-should-have-on-hand-for-job-interviews.