Employers want to get to know you and how you’re able to handle pressure and problem-solving. The whole purpose of an interview is to meet and greet future employees. Interviewers are not out there to trip you and ask tricky questions.
If during an interview you’re asked, “Give an example of how you’ve_______ in your current work.” I’ve been asked how I’ve taken the initiative, handled an emergency situation, or how I solved a problem.
The advice I’ve gotten from an experienced interviewer recommended telling a story, relating to past work experiences. The hero’s story is a good formula to use. Basically, it’s structure begins with a short intro to the problem, then a bad situation (like slaying a dragon), ending with a solution. Employers want to hear how you handle struggles and turn a bad situation into a good one. They want to see a real human, not a perfect robot.
Here’s an example of a hero’s story. I told a shorter version of this story during my interview with Tesla.
“Give an example of how you’ve taken the initiative in your current work.”
I currently work for a swim school and about a month after I got hired I made a big mistake. It was enough to make my boss visibly frustrated and angry with me, which made me worried that she might fire me. I completely own up to it because I didn’t know how to do this certain task, which caused a parent to become angry and rightfully so. I should’ve been more diligent to watch the training videos and learn my responsibilities.
The problem was those training videos wouldn’t let me skip ahead if I needed to refresh my memory about one particular step, and they were incredibly dull and mind-numbing. These videos were often ten or fifteen minutes long, so imagine having to sit through another fifteen minutes just to review one step and end up wasting half an hour on one video. This doesn’t sound efficient right?
So I took notes when my boss retrained me on every task in JackRabbit, the management software we used. Another problem I came across was how JackRabbit was user unfriendly and it wasn’t something that you can easily learn on your own.
I had to make it up to my boss somehow. After I took a lot of notes I realized I could make a small booklet. So I created a training manual. This manual was a step-by-step guide, kind of like a Dummies book, of how to do every task in JackRabbit.
I presented the training manual to my boss and she was impressed, enough to gift me a $10 Starbucks gift card and she emailed the manual to corporate. A few weeks later one of the managers from corporate drove three hours away just to thank me and asked for my honest opinion about the training videos.
During an interview, remember to reference previous work problems and how you solved it. Your hero’s story doesn’t have to be elaborate, it can be mundane like how you handled a huge number of customers all at once. Set aside time to think about how you would answer common interview questions, then write it down.