Don’t know how I managed to miss this post from Shawn Callahan of Anecdote from January of this year since storytelling in the job search is my “thing.”
Shawn suggests several excellent ways to find stories you can use in your job search, especially in interviews:
- Draw a timeline of your career with significant events and your feelings about them.
- Recount remembered events out loud to yourself, or someone else. (I would advise framing the events as accomplishments.) If you write down the events, avoid recounting them the way you’ve written it because they will sound unnatural, Shawn says.
- Look at random images to see if they jog your memory about other professional experiences.
- Listen to the stories of others. “Make notes about any anecdote that springs to mind about your own experiences at work focusing on the ones that set you apart,” Shawn advises.
- Always carry a story notebook to jot them down because memories may creep up on you by surprise, and, Shawn says, “I will guarantee you will forget it instantly if you don’t either write it down of have the opportunity to tell the story a couple of times.”
Now, for ways to polish your ability to tell these stories in interviews, Shawn advises:
- Practicing stories, which will most likely at first sound “rambling and, quite frankly, boring.” If you tell the stories to others, you’ll learn what to edit out based on their responses — “facial expressions, comments.”
- Be specific and avoid generalizations. … The story has to about a specific individual (you!) “trying to achieve something, ideally with some obstacle that [you] eventually overcame.”
- Help people visualize what’s happening. “The best stories are ones that the listener can picture vividly in their mind’s eye,” Shawn says.
Shawn says to aim for about a dozen stories you can tell in interviews. Although I have found that a stockpile of as few as five stories can be adapted in response to most interview questions, I advise shooting for a goal of about 20.