“Well Tony, three of us were interviewing him and we asked him if he could give us an example of where he put together a deal and how he did it from scratch. We thought he was going to start an example of what he had done in the past and all he did was talk in circles for five minutes. Then one of us asked him, “Just give us an example of where you’ve been successful. And after a long pause, he said, Let me think about it a minute.”
That pretty much ended the interview and my candidate’s opportunity to get hired. He didn’t have a story of where he’d been successful. Ironically, he had lots of successes in his background, but he just hadn’t practiced them for the interviewing situation.
This is a short lesson. It’s really a sad lesson. It doesn’t matter what kind of position you are interviewing for, you’ve got to have stories of where you’ve been successful. If you’re a candidate, you only need two or three of them. But you have to have them. This guy lost a job at a $150,000 base salary with an absolutely phenomenal company.
I had given him access to “the job search solution,” our 60 hour tutorial on finding a job which has a whole section on how to tell stories. But, unfortunately, he said he just didn’t have time to do it. And, besides, “I’m really good at interviewing.” Famous last words…
A wise man learns by mistakes, the wiser person learns by others mistakes. Please, please, please, if you’re a candidate looking for a job, you better have some really good stories as to how you’ve been successful.
