The Best Job Candidates Are the Best Storytellers – The best candidates are also the best storytellers because it’s all about making an impression and being credible.
When it comes to finding a new job, an obstacle that working people often encounter is the interview. Many people have the ability, the right experience, and the most accomplishments, but they fail in the interview process. Therefore, in this article, referring to an article from Harvard Business Review, we will recommend how to prepare before going to a job interview. How do we need to change our perspective and old methods? And what should we do in the next job interview? Let’s make it through to the next round and have the best chance of getting the job.
The Story of a Job Interview
After we have the opportunity to be called for an interview with the company we have applied to, what most people usually do is to quickly find the most neat and beautiful clothes to prepare for the interview day, open the company’s website to read the history of the company’s founding, vision, mission, and list of executives, trying to memorize them as quickly as trying to memorize a school motto. Because when interviewing for elementary or secondary school, the school motto is the most popular, right? But when it comes to job interviews, the person who remembers the motto the most accurately, or the history of the company, or the names of the executives, may not be the one who gets the job. But the person who tells the story the best will get the job.
“It’s all about the impression.”
The word “impressive” does not have only one meaning. If we try to select the meanings that seem to be most related to the word “impressive” together, it will mean being accepted, increasing the level of interest, and may also mean being impressed, sealed, or very intentional in leaving a permanent mark of ourselves where we want. If we compare it to an epidemic, we are the carriers. If anyone is infected with this type of epidemic, they will have a memory of us embedded in their heads.
To understand this better, let’s think of a story about someone who has impressed us a lot. Let’s ask ourselves why we think about this person so often, what are the stories about him that we can’t forget… Well, we have contracted the plague of these people.
In the current situation where everyone wants to change jobs, there are many people looking for job opportunities, whether they are new graduates looking for their first job or people who have been working for a long time but are facing burnout from their current job and are looking for new opportunities at work. If you are one of these people and are looking for new opportunities but do not have the right preparation methods, these are the things we must remember not to do at all, such as:
1. Spend all your time memorizing company information.
Finding information about the company, such as the story since its founding, the founders’ names, the list of shareholders, the story of the company from its failure to its current success. Some people even remember the house number and the number of employees in the company. We don’t have to do this much, even though every candidate tries to do this. The interviewer already knows these things. We may not need to remind them. In fact, the interviewer is looking for what we can give them.
2. Sleep and speculate on questions.
Because in working life, there is no clear answer. There is no fixed rule that in a job interview you must answer this way or that way in order to get the job. Because the answer we prepare may not be usable.
If we are another person who is doing the same thing as everyone else when preparing for a job interview, by searching for information such as “tips for getting a job interview” or “top questions during a job interview”, are we doing this or have we done this before?
What these popular articles are saying is that you need to find your strengths and weaknesses, present your strengths and tell what you can do, right? The answers you prepare on these topics may bore the interviewer because it becomes uninteresting.
3. Tell the truth even though those things are in the resume.
When we are interviewed, we keep talking about our educational background or our proud GPA, or talking about the awards we received from various competitions, about how outstanding we are from where we have worked in the past or where we are currently working.
Do you know what? Our resume already tells us these things. If we talk about these things, it may not make any impression on the interviewer. After we walk out of the interview room, our identity will be empty, unmemorable. In fact, the facts in our resume are not what we should say to make an impression. Because don’t forget that we were called for an interview because the interviewer read it and called us. So don’t show the same things again during the interview.
What should we do before going to a job interview?
If we have some experience in job interviews, we are familiar with popular questions such as “Tell me about yourself” or “Can you describe a challenge you have faced?” These are questions that we can benefit from if we have a great story and a way to tell it interestingly enough to leave a small mark on the listener’s (in this case, the interviewer) memory.
“How do you picture yourself to the interviewer?”
An interview is like a white board, where we draw what we want the interviewer (in this case, the interviewee) to see and what we think they want from us. This is the key to standing out in the interviewer’s mind more than others. After all, we all have a story to tell, whether it’s about overcoming obstacles or learning from mistakes. So the real competition is who can tell their story better.
“A good story takes the listener on a journey.”
We need to make the beginning, middle and end of the story clear. Tell it in a visual way, such as the beginning is a picture of us before we face the challenge, before we grow to the level we are today. The middle is when we face pressure, we face challenges and there may be many difficult times. At the end, we may succeed or fail. But the important thing at the end is, “What did we get out of that challenge?”
Let’s be a little more specific. A good story should immerse the listener in the story, as if they were there with you. We need an intriguing beginning, a middle part that makes people curious about the journey, and of course, a middle part that keeps the listener engaged enough to root for the outcome.
- At the beginning : Choose a story that will leave our mark in the way we want.
When you start telling a story, start by sketching out the main idea so your audience can visualize it. Remember, we’re all human. We don’t have to kill monsters like in movies to be human, and you don’t have to tell stories in a job interview that make you look like a hero.
“Stories of both success and failure will make the interviewer feel like you stand out and that you are a self-aware candidate.”
We all have had the experience of facing a challenging task. Our abilities may have been unlocked by a certain event or something that led us to the time when we needed to use new abilities to get through it. Maybe we were the one who supported and encouraged our boss through a bad day. Or maybe by going through a time when we ourselves had fallen, we came out of it realizing those mistakes and came out a new, stronger and more capable person.
- Middle : Draw the interviewer deeper into the details of the memory.
Instead of just saying that we won an award or accomplished a difficult task, we need to share those successes in a clever way with stories. Excite and engage the interviewer with a variety of details. We need to make him want to know, “What did we sacrifice for that award?” or “How did we feel when we faced the challenge?” or “Who stood by us and supported us?” or “How did we get through everything alone?”
“God is in the details.”
As the saying goes, “God is in the details.” This means paying attention to the smallest details, but if we put our heart into them, they can become great things. It’s not a list of information on a resume, but a complete memory that the interviewer will be able to see the whole of you, your analytical, problem-solving, determination, risk-taking, and self-reflection qualities from the stories you tell.
- Ending : Don’t just be a hero, be a weak one too.
Our goal is to share stories during interviews, it’s not just about sharing amazing stories all the time. The last thing we want to do is to make a real difference and make an impression by showing all sides of ourselves. We can choose to balance successes with failures in the same story.
“Sharing the best experience, the best determination, even if that time it was the time that the result was not desired.”
In the real world, no one succeeds every time they try. We are not superheroes from superhero movies. We are just human beings who make mistakes. In fact, we make more mistakes than we succeed. So when we own up to our mistakes, when we admit that we did things we didn’t want to admit, and when we are willing to reveal our weaknesses, that’s when we shine the brightest in the eyes of the interviewer.
Conclusion
In the job interview process, there is a variety of presentation methods of the interviewee and the needs of the interviewer. What is the same is that if we want the job, we must make the interviewer remember us first. Remembering here means remembering in an impressive way. Having a good memory will create good results. Therefore, we should not waste time doing things that are not beneficial.
Being a good storyteller is something that can be practiced. Find an impressive story that happened to us, from our experience of fighting challenges, obstacles or problems during difficult times. It doesn’t have to be a positive or negative ending. It just shows that we know ourselves well enough. We know where we went wrong and what we gained from those failures or successes. These stories will make us stand out and be the most memorable.
“Success is memorable, but what you get along with it is worth sharing.”
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