• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

You might prepare an answer like this:

I was told a few years ago that my budgeting wasn’t good enough. I had never received any formal training, so I immediately registered in a night class. On my last review, my supervisor noted how much improvement I’d made. My budgeting skills are now well above average. He did me a big favor.

Congratulations. In this example, you told the interviewer:

• What the problem was (budgeting)

• Why it was a problem (no training)

• What you did to correct it (night class)

• What the results were (improved skill level)

Moreover, you’ve also shown that you are open to constructive criticism and most importantly, that you are prepared to act on feedback. Most employees are not. If the interviewer is keeping score, you just received double bonus points because employers will hire someone with average skills and great attitude over a self-confessed superstar any day.

Build Your Story Book

Following the T-account exercise, you need to turn your strengths and accomplishments into memorable stories because everyone likes a good story. More importantly, people retain ideas more easily if they’re presented in the form of a story. After hours and hours of interviewing, it’s often difficult for interviewers to remember one candidate from another unless one of them—that’ll be you—really grabs their interest with a great story.

Storytelling has other advantages:

• When you link ideas for the interviewer, you’re far more likely to engage the listener’s interest and leave a favorable impression.

• The conversational tone relaxes your interviewer and will turn an interrogation into a conversation.

• Storytelling appeals to an interviewer’s “gut-feel” and innate ability to hire people with “promise.”

• Given 2 people who are equally qualified on paper, an employer will tend to hire the best storyteller because the person is perceived to have superior communication skills.

Unlike the fairy tales you heard as a child, your stories are based on facts. They portray you as a modern-day hero—confident but not arrogant, decisive but not overbearing, driven but not maniacal. You must provide accurate illustrations of the significant goals you’ve achieved and the skills and training you mustered to achieve them. You get to play the part of the “hero” who invented the new product, closed the big deal, or in some other way vanquished the dragon.

Which accomplishments prompted the employer to want to meet you in the first place? Those are the stories to use. The key elements of each story relate to the requirements—be they in sales, marketing, engineering, or something else—you outlined in the T-account exercise.

For example, you have discovered from your research that the employer needs to be able to bring new products to market in a timely manner and you have 10 years’ experience in new product development. Your story might sound something like this:

Mr. Employer, in the summer of 2009 our major competitor, in an attempt to run us out of business, began giving away a product that they claimed had the same features as our mainstay product. Not surprisingly, revenue plummeted 90 percent in our next quarter. The bottom fell out of our stock. Several of our key development and salespeople quit. In response, I led 2 small teams of 6 engineers on a mission to develop our next-generation product and to expose the weaknesses in the competitor’s offering. Within five weeks, we discovered serious design flaws in the security layer of their software that made the user’s data vulnerable to hackers. We staged a demonstration of our findings for our sales and marketing team. They designed a counterattack that stopped our competitor in its tracks. Meanwhile, my second team added major functionality to our core product. When the flaws in our competitor’s product became front-page news, my team was ready with a bulletproof upgrade. We did all this in less than nine weeks. Company revenues surged 15 percent higher than our previous best quarter.

What is the interviewer