As a hiring manager, it’s incredibly unsatisfying to interview someone who has no stories to share. After all, how can someone know what you can do if you can’t talk about what you’ve done? Go through the job description and highlight all the soft skills that are featured. You’ll likely find things like “ability to work on a team and independently,” “comfort with multitasking,” or “strong communication skills.”
Then, come up with an example of a time you demonstrated each of these traits—though keep in mind that you don’t necessarily need a different example for each. In fact, it’s better to come up with stories that are flexible, since you’ll likely have to adapt them to the exact questions anyway.
Once you have your stories, it’s time to think a little deeper about why these questions are asked in the first place. What does the interviewer actually want to know?
Take a few seconds to think about this before you start answering the question—even if you have the perfect story prepared—so that you can make an appropriate introductory statement about essentially what the moral of your story is going to be.
The reason for this is that even though the interviewer is specifically asking you to tell a story, the idea is that he or she will learn something about the way you do things. The problem with this is that what the interviewer gleans from your story could be very different from what you were hoping to share.
For example, say you tell that story about standing up to the director of marketing when asked to talk about conflict with a previous supervisor. You eloquently move through the story about how you shared your hesitation about the new marketing campaign to no avail, but once the initial numbers came in, it was clear that you were right. You triumphantly showed the performance to the director, and she agreed to scrap the campaign.
While this story is definitely suitable, there are actually a few different ways it could be taken the wrong way. The interviewer could hone in on the fact that you really didn’t do anything until it was too late or that you were unpersuasive or a poor communicator the first time you raised concerns about the campaign.Even if your story isn’t exactly what the interview question asked for, if it’s framed well and you go the extra mile to tell the interviewer what he or she should take away from it, you’ll actually end up making a stronger impression.
So, don’t stress too much about having the perfect stories lined up or the exact relevant experience. Instead, focus on the messages you’re trying to communicate to the hiring manager, and back them up with the stories that you have.
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