Your Interview Story

Use the structure of story to learn about yourself and get the job you want.

This guide presents hands-on, practical advice to use story to help you get the job you want. Think of your story as a machine that helps you understand yourself (and get hired doing work you want to do).

Your goal during an interview is to position yourself as a 1-of-1 candidate who posses a unique combination of skills, traits, and experiences. You are not one of many, you are 1-of-1.

When you present yourself as a 1-of-1, then no one else can compete, because there’s only you. For this to work, however, your 1-of-1 combination must solve their problem and give them something new and show you are a special person that they will want on the team. You must do all three.

Examples:

• You posses both the skills of a designer and a the product sense of a PM and you have a personal story of resilience that is inspiring, formidable, and impressive.
• You can code and are a charismatic sales person and you are a beloved leader of a large and powerful open-source software community group.
• You can write copy and illustrate and are loved by a large and respected creative community.
• You are a lawyer and you fluently speak the native language an important sales region and you have a personal reason for working on this problem.

In each example, you accomplish three goals:

1. Solve their problem
2. Give them something new
3. Show you are a special person.

Your 1-of-1 story comes from the choices you’ve made in life, your grit, your resilience, and your attitude. Attitude? Really? Yes. Your attitude matters. No one wants to work with someone who acts like they don’t want to be there, only helps when they are asked, or seems untrustworthy, selfish, or condescending.

1. Tell me about yourself…

Don’t just list how long you worked at your last job… Instead, give your interviewer a reason to care. If you are unsure how, then try this template based on the series This I believe that aired on NPR from 2005–2009.

Here’s my version of the template:

• I believe…
• So I…
• You can see this in how…

Example… Here’s my own “I believe” statement that attempts to make sense of my varied career. Instead of apologizing for being involved in many things, I offer the listener a through-line that gets to the heart of who I am and why I care.

I believe that story, art, and design can bend the arc of humanity’s progress, if you do it right, and so I try to bring this idea into everything I do: from movies to startups to paintings to books and to ballets. You can see this in how I work with founders to design their products and how I at every job I’ve ever had, I’ve always help create something of tremendous value that didn’t exist before. I do this through a unique approach I call Story-Driven Design.

Show how your experiences prepare you to solve the hiring manager’s specific problems. Show that you have a unique combination that they can’t get anywhere else. Don’t try to be the same as everyone else. Instead show that you are a 1-of-1 unique combination that they need to solve their problem. It could be your unique combination of past experiences. It could be your unique perspective on hard problems. It could be a unique combination of skills. Find a combination that no one else has. Win a race that no one else is running.

2. Tell me about a project you’ve worked on…

Don’t just say “we shipped a thing, it was cool.” Instead, tell a story that has the interviewer actually rooting for you. Here’s the template for your story

• We had a problem. It was bigger than we thought. It was critical to the business.
• Initial Failure. We thought we knew how to fix it. Easy, right? But our first attempt was a total failure.
• Realized we were wrong. We were thinking about it incorrectly. What we thought was the problem wasn’t the real problem. We made a second attempt. There was signs of progress, but it wasn’t enough.
• Solved the deeper problem. And then we saw a way to solve the bigger/deeper/real problem. We finally got to the root. We kept asking why, kept digging into what customers were saying, and kept re-examining the data until we found out what was really happening. Every problem is a search for truth. Once you find out the truth, the real truth, then you have a shot at success.
• Transformative Results: big impact, transformational for the business. Changed how we go forward.

3. What else should we know about you…

Screenwriters have a way to create compelling characters. You put the character into a nearly impossible situation and then watch what they do. Then ask: “what choice does the character make with it really matters?”

The choices that matter are the big ones. Everyone has a few of these stories. So before the interview, review these for yourself what choices have you made when it really mattered? Reveal your true character and we will root for you to win. The interviewer won’t pull stories out of you. You need to provide them in the right places when it matters most.

Final Note: The Gift of Practice

Interviewing for a job is hard. Telling a compelling story is hard. It takes practice. And what makes the problem even worse is that you can’t sound so rehearsed that you sound insincere. You have to deeply know your stories, so that you can deliver them with ease. Spontaneous telling.

Not memorization — but embodied, in the moment telling.

If you want to workshop your stories, call this number. It’s free.

(650) 675–5734

It’s free. Open 24–7 365 day-n-night. And is programmed to be supportive and helpful. This is my Delphi. It’s an AI-version of all of my writing and posts you can use to talk through your story, art, and design problems.

Give it a try. Call or text this number: +1 (650) 675–5734.

Thanks for reading. Best of luck on your job search. I believe in you.

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