In a 45 minutes to one hour interview you'll have three to five opportunities to share a success story with the interviewer. If that is the case you're going to need more than one or two stories. Additionally you may be called back for one or two more follow-up interviews. I know of people who have had five interviews with a company before the process came to an end. Keeping this in mind you really need a pool of 15 to 20 success stories in your pocket.
How do you build your story? Where do you get the ideas for the stories? Remember to use the S-A-R format for the stories. Start with your resume and elevator speech and look at all the points and accomplishments listed. Every point and accomplishment is an avenue to convey your potential to the interviewer. Another source of successes are past co-workers of bosses and ask them if they remember a time when you helped them out of a tight spot. And if you still have them, look over past performance evaluations for stories ideas.
Now you have the story idea. Remember to keep the listener's attention! You cannot overwhelm them with details, you need to present the situation in a compelling way. For example one client shared a story with me:
On a wastewater treatment plant the equipment vendor could not provide the large anchor bolts until 6 weeks after our first planned concrete placement, severely messing up our schedule. I needed to get the bolts from somewhere else. The specifications were very distinctive due to the stresses the bolts would be required to hold once the plant was in full operation. I knew that even a small variance in the quality or strength of the bolt could result in more problems down the road.
The client made a few mistakes in his first attempt. The story is too specific and would only appeal to a very specific interview. Notice the personalization of the problem. The situation should describe the problem you fixed not direct the interviewer to a problem you were associated with. With a little editing we came up with:
The company had a problem where an equipment vendor could not provide an essential part thus putting a project at risk of failure.
Short, sweet and to the point; plus it has the added benefit to fit a number of different business scenarios. Lets move into the action the client took in order to save the project:
I needed a local fabricator who could make the Anchor Bolts to the required specifications and deliver them to the job in 2 weeks – just in time for our first foundation concrete placement. With a great deal of research I contacted the original vendor's manufacture and negotiated a deal to deliver directly to our company.
The only real change here is in the specifics of the narrative. Every business has had a vendor drop the ball on them, but not every business needed Anchor Bolts in their concrete. We came up with:
I researched and found a local vendor that could provide the part allowing us to meet the project's deadline.
This example allows the storyteller to utilize the listener's experience and frame of mind to set up the story in a quick and engaging way. Moving into the result or the story's conclusion we need to expand its length by adding specifics... numbers, percentages and savings that the interviewer will appreciate:
By doing this I preserved our schedule and saved $5,800.00 per part. This equated to a $1.5 million savings to the entire project. In addition to the materials savings there was an additional savings of 23% in labor costs due to the timely delivery of the parts.
The first draft of the story may be too wordy, but that is okay. The goal is to get the success story down to a length that creates dialogue between you and the interviewer where you can share the details that resonate within their environment. Once this story is done, the next stories will come easier and so on, until you have a collection of stories.
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