Harry Urschel recently published a blog post that serves as a good reminder that not all aspects of your career experience are ripe for storytelling in job interviews.

One of the cardinal rules of cardinal rules of job search is not to trash a former employer. As Urschel points out, “job search coaches will consistently tell you to never bash or criticize previous employers. It almost never results in a good outcome for you. Yet… it’s one of the most common mistakes people make in job interviews.” See this recent post for an illustration of an employer-trashing that I believe is a mistake.

The temptation to bash and trash a previous boss can come up in a number of ways in an interview, for example in response to questions like these:

• “Why did you leave your last job?”
• “Have you ever had difficulty with a supervisor?” This one has always seemed to me designed to test the interviewee — to see if he or she will fall into the trap of disparaging the ex-boss.

Interviewees may also be inclined to criticize a former boss when asked behavioral questions with a negative edge to them. Urschel gives a sample dangerous answer to a question that must have been something like, “Tell me about a project that failed and what you did about it:”

“objectives and milestones weren’t well defined for me”

These negativity-tinged behavioral questions are common; interviewers want to know how you’ve overcome bad situations. See examples of such questions among the samples here, starting at Question 25.

One reason negative stories about former bosses is a bad idea is that the interviewer will assume you will also trash your boss if you get the job you’re interviewing for.

Urschel points to another reason:

Whether you like it or not, or think it’s fair or not, an interviewer generally will naturally take your employers side in the stories you relate. Anyone who has been in a supervisory or managerial role for any length of time, comes to realize that there are always two sides to every story. And while they certainly realize that an employee may have legitimate complaints, the tendency is to wonder what the other side of the story might be.

Urschel prescribes a positive spin to the way you begin stories that relate to former employers:

“The project failed because I didn’t make sure I had objectives and milestones clearly defined for me. It was a great lesson to learn and a mistake I certainly won’t let happen again.”

“My manager and I had differing views on how to deal with customers, and I didn’t creatively come up with a resolution that would satisfy us both. The experience has taught me how to be more solution oriented.”

Bottom line is to put yourself in the interviewer’s shoes and consider how your ex-employer stories sound to your prospective employer.

Job-seekers probably don’t think about the sheer numbers of people that hiring decision-makers talk to during the recruiting and hiring process — and how candidates need to stand out from the pack to be remembered.

An interesting — if slightly flawed — article by Esther Choy describes the kind of numbers corporate recruiter Steve Song encounters as he meets with MBA grads:

Song, for example, recruits for his bank and frequently travels to Kellogg to do coffee chats and interview candidates. Each time he speaks with 15-25 interested students within a four-hour period. At the end of his daylong recruiting trip, he returns to his New York office at around 9 p.m. to continue his regular day of work. Scott typically meets 100-200 people at corporate-sponsored social functions at each school, interviews 12 candidates per day, and eventually only invites 25% of the candidates for in-house interviews.

Without explicitly suggesting to readers that candidates should tell stories to the decision-makers who are talking with multitudes of would-be hires, Choy notes that stories are much more memorable than data. She cites a stat from “cognitive psychologist, Jerome Bruno” — I’m pretty sure she means Jerome Bruner — “that information is 20 times more likely to be remembered if it is shared in the context of narratives, or, stories.”

She then offers six bullet points on how to tell your story. The first is “Go at least five layers deeper than your initial answer [to a typical interview question].” What does that mean exactly? How do you quantify the layers of an interview response?

She also notes that when asked a question such as “Why do you want to work in investment banking?” or “Why do you want to work for [a specific company]?”, candidates sometimes say it’s because they want to gain more client experience. In her “five layers” bullet point, she urges job-seekers to dig deeper in explaining why they want more client experience.

The flaw there is that saying you want to work in a certain field or for a certain company to gain more experience is a terrible response. It’s a me-first response that violates a cardinal rule of job-seeking: “Ask not what the employer can do; ask what you can do for the employer.”

And, like so very many writings that prescribe storytelling as a solution to business and career issues, Choy’s piece offers no examples of what a story told to a corporate recruiter might look like.

It’s still a valuable piece, though, for stressing how hard it is to be remembered amid the vast numbers of people recruiters deal with — and how story is a great way to beat the odds.

Choy is a practitioner with an agency that’s new to me, Leadership Story Lab, which I’d like to learn more about.

OK, this post is admittedly a bit off-topic, but it’s something I needed to get off my chest…

The other day I received an email from someone whose name seemed slightly familiar, but I couldn’t place who he was.

The email was mass-mailed to about a dozen people, and it landed in my Junk folder (affirming that the sender is not among my contacts).

This email was the sender’s attempt at networking. Here’s how it read:

HELLO,

I am seeking help in my job search to find leads, ideas and suggestions to finding positions that would match my backgound and areas of expertise and knowledge.

I am seeking any leads and/or referrals or any information on positions that match my skill in programming analysis, quality assurance testing, software design or development, software support, information technology and communications system designs. Please see the attachments that show my specific areas of expertise and knowledge and previous use of these skills.

I would appreciate any help you can provide and any suggestion you can make as to how and where to seek employment.

Sincerely Yours,

Several things are wrong with this approach:

• The email was not sent to me individually. Just the fact that I was one of a dozen recipients shows how impersonal and spammy the job-seeker’s approach was.
• The email did not address me personally.
• Maybe the sender assumes I remember who he is, but that’s probably not a wise assumption (since I don’t). A good opening would have been: “Dear Kathy, Perhaps you remember me from …”
• “backgound” is misspelled in his first paragraph.
• He refers to attachments, but the email had no attachments. I thought maybe my email app strips attachments off of emails that go into the Junk folder, but I just checked; plenty of emails in the Junk folder have attachments.
• He refers to attachments, plural. It’s perfectly reasonable to send a resume with a networking email, but any more attachments than that puts too much of a burden on the recipient.
• His message is straightforward and not unreasonable, but it lacks any warmth, friendliness, or personal connection.
• Asking for “help” in a networking request is on the fringes of inappropriate — or at least ineffective — behavior. It’s much better to ask for advice. People like to be asked for advice because it makes them feel knowledgeable and important.
• Networking should be a mutual, sharing activity. The sender should have indicated willingness to do something for me or shared information he knew I would appreciate.

Update: I got the same email TWICE MORE again from him — this time mass-mailed to 214 people (!!) and with the attachments.