Interviewers Lockerroom

Yes, you get to tell stories, during your interview! You will only be successful if you include the following steps. About 30 percent of interviews over the last several years have been formatted to what the industry calls “behavioral interviewing”.  It means that is what you did in the past is an indication of what you will do in the future in a similar situation. Now folks in human resources understand all this stuff, but you just don’t get it.

Well it’s time to become a great storyteller. No, I don’t mean liar, jokester, or some made up mumbo jumbo. Now let me let you in on a secret. Read this slowly so you can respond when ready and all the time. YOU CAN PREPARE FOR THIS, AND LAND THE JOB based upon your storytelling ability.

If you have been on an interview lately, maybe you were asked:

Question: How do you decide work gets top priority, when you are managing several projects?

Answer: Whichever one I can be done the quickest!

WRONG!

Create a story for the response. For example:

“I had this situation about two weeks ago, where we had several department projects due at one time and were behind because several folks were out sick with the flu. Two were major projects where we had to deliver to “Customer A” as scheduled, no exceptions.

So I quickly evaluated our overall workload, created levels of projects by priority,  reassigned my most skilled staff to complete  customer A’s work 1 day ahead of time. Everyone else kept working on the other projects, and I negotiated new delivery times for the last group of customers. At the end of the week, we were in pretty good shape, with all customers satisfied.”

So the three steps to interview storytelling are:

•   State you situation
•   Tell me what you did, how and why
•   Tell me your results.

You can search all over the internet for behavioral type questions that you can practice and prepare so you can be a great interview storyteller. I know you will get a heads up in the interview!

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