Interviewing is hard and scary. It always feels like there’s too much on the line and you’re nervous about getting the job that you can’t focus in the moment. With the right kind of preparation, you can make your interview anxiety melt away. How? By becoming a great teller of stories.
Do you freeze up when someone asks you to talk about yourself? Or asks you to share a past work challenge? The reason answering these questions is hard is because you don’t have a framework for our answers.
Aristotle gave us this framework when he first described the concept of storytelling in three acts. Good storytelling, he taught, has a beginning (the setup), a middle (the action) and an end (the resolution), and can be used to take listeners on a rewarding journey.
You can utilize this simple framework to become masterful at telling your own story, the story of your greatest challenge, and the best story of all – how you can be the solution to your interviewer’s problems.
In today’s work environment, hiring managers are overstretched and barely have time to hire the people needed to help them solve the challenges in front of them. Their immediate goal is to make the best, most appropriate hire and know that their problems are going to get solved.
– Susanne Goldstein, a business strategist and career coach, is author of a new book “Carry a Paintbrush: How to Be the Artistic Director of Your Own Career." Learn more at www.carryapaintbrush.com.
