Storytelling: sell yourself in a job interview

“So, tell me a little about yourself.” Almost every job interview starts with this question and, in almost every case, the answer is a missed opportunity. Instead of summarizing their education, job history, and current situation, use this inevitable request as an excuse to tell a brief but memorable story about yourself, a story that explains, heart to heart, why you’re right for the job. Stories give you the opportunity to create “emotional rapport” with the interviewer.

How to Prepare Your Story.

1)   Select the Right Story. Every great story begins with three elements: a person who is going to do something, a place where the action will happen,a time that anchors the story in the real world. It adds emotion (and therefore memorability) if you briefly flesh out these elements. Here are some examples:

-“Back when I was just getting started out in sales, I was living in Phoenix, where the summers were so hot that you could literally fry an egg on the sidewalk.”; “About five years ago, I had an inside sales job, working inside a huge cubicle farm.”

2) Identify the Goal, the Obstacle, the Decision, and the Outcome. For example, suppose you’re telling a story that is intended to leave the impression that you’re a self-starter who’s motivated no matter what. The goal in this case might be a big sale, the obstacle might be a particularly difficult customer, and the decision might be what you did to help that customer make a decision. Important: Don’t tell a story that makes you out to be some kind of superhero. Ideally, your story should include obstacles that you overcome as the result of your character and resilience.

 How to Tell Your Story

When it comes to actually telling your story, there are two crucial rules: 1) Signal that you’re going to tell a story. Don’t just leap into your story. Instead, introduce it with a conversational ploy, like “Can I tell you a story about that?” or “I’ve got a story for you that answers that question.” 2) Keep it short and sweet. You should aim to tell your entire story in around 2 minutes. Include just enough detail to make the story real and visceral.

How To Say It (and Not Say It)

-Here’s an example. The situation is as follows. You’re interviewing for a job selling software solutions to enterprises. Your interviewer is a sales manager who’s worked primarily for large firms. Here’s a conversation with a carefully-crafted story:

Interviewer: Tell me a little about yourself.

Candidate: Let me tell you my story. A decade ago (time reference), I was working as a programmer (past continuous to show background activity) in a group of about 100 in a remote development center. A real skunk-works, if you know what I mean. (expressing the hope that one has been understood, especially when one has spoken in a way that is imprecise or unclear.) We developers created an innovative (powerful adjective) piece of software, but the sales team was too busy to give us much attention. It scared me to death to get away from my computer screen, but I sucked it up ( accept something bad and deal with it well, controlling your emotions) and called some of our biggest customers to discuss what we’d developed and whether they could use it to solve real-life problems.

I ended up (to reach or come to a situation that was not planned or expected) speaking with an engineer at Lockheed Aerospace and we figured out (discover) that our software would save them about a million dollars a year.

Lockheed ended up not just buying the prototype, but gave us the upfront money to turn it into a real product.

It was at that moment, when that deal closed, that I realized that I loved selling and solving problems for customers more than I loved programming.

And I’ve been in sales and marketing ever since!

As you can see, the story tells the interviewer far more about the candidate, and the candidate’s entrepreneurial attitude, than the recitation of mere fact. If you want be successful in a job interview,  you can impact your chances of landing a job simply by trying.

Created by Comfy Languages Team