Don't Take This Outdated Advice

You can tell a story that includes all of the 4 categories— situation, task, action, result— and that story can still fall completely flat. I'm going to give you an example of a story that fits the STAR method that falls flat, and after, a story that fits the STAR method but gets you hired. actually has a direct impact on someone hiring you. Example 1. Situation: I was called into my boss's office. They told me they had an assignment for me. Task: They tasked me with the office move of 70 people. Action: I executed the office move efficiently. Results: The move went well. We got from point A to point B, all of our furniture, all of our people, No hitches. It worked out really well. That's answer 1. Okay, now technically that checks all the boxes. It gives you the situation, it gives you the task, it gives you the action you took, and it gives you the result. But it doesn't give you what's missing, which is emotional resonance. They couldn't feel anything from that story. That story is boring and it would fall flat in an interview. It didn't give them very many details. It didn't give them anything To say, hmm, this person did something differently. It just says this person was capable of doing something successfully. Great. So were all the other people that we interviewed. So this is where the example is really going to come to life. Example 2, tell me about a time you handled a challenging situation. Sure. So I was working at my desk and my boss came up and he said, Natalie, we need to talk to you in the office. We've all gathered. Would you meet us there in a couple of minutes? Me? Okay, sure. This sounds serious. I get up, I go into the office. What could they possibly want? They sit me down and they say, look, we have a project we need you to work on, and it's really high stakes. It's really important that we can trust the person that we ultimately assign this to. If you don't feel comfortable taking it on, you don't have to because it's a high stakes project, and if you don't succeed at it, it's gonna be a problem. I'm like, okay, what is it? They say, we need to get this office moved. We've signed a lease for a new space. This is our timeline. We're going to need the new office move happening within the next month. And we need you to orchestrate it. We need you to plan it. Now, here's the caveat. We can't have any downtime. We need all of the equipment, including the servers and everything moved. And we need everybody on board. If there's any downtime, that's going to be a big issue and it could put the company at risk. So I just want you to understand how important this is. We need this done properly. I'm starting to think about it. I want to be somebody who's a team player. I want to cooperate. So I say, I'm in, no problem, I got this. Okay, so I leave the office, I leave the meeting room, and the first thing I do is I start Googling how to do an office move, how to successfully execute an office move. What comes up are a bunch of books on Amazon. Okay, perfect. I'll get approval. I'll order a bunch of Amazon books and I'll start with those. So the first book with the first page I open up says this. It says, the person who's usually assigned the office move is not qualified or equipped to deal with such a big task, so they often end up demoted or out of a job by the time the move is complete. I start freaking out at this point 'cause especially what they just told me, right? They're telling me like, oh, you have to do a good job of this. If there's any downtime, This is a high-stakes project. So I'm freaking out at this point. I need to make sure that I cover all my bases. So what do I do next? I have a little freakout. I'm like, okay, this is what I'm gonna do to ensure this goes well. I ordered a bunch more books. I gathered all the checklists I could find for office relocation so I don't miss anything. I've got everything there. And then I start to work out subcategories of tasks. I can't possibly cover everything here. I do not know what the IT department, what the HR department, will need to move or what moving pieces will have to happen in IT. I don't know what will have to happen in development. I don't know what will have to happen with operations. I don't know what will have to happen with the executives. I decided to assemble what was called a relocation team. I need somebody from each department to gather every week to make sure we've got all of our bases covered. Now, this includes someone from IT, someone from development, someone from operations. Someone from the exec team. I need one representative from each team every week, and if they can't attend, then I'm going to need them to review what we discussed and weigh in with any comments. I got everybody on board, and that made me already feel better because I was like, okay, it's not all on me, and I know that I need to rely on other people's expertise here because I can't possibly know every single detail of what's going to need to be included. These meetings went really well. I presented what I had. This is where we're at. This is the timeline. This is what's going to get done at this time and this time. The team really stepped in. So the IT guy would say, hey, are you missing this? You have a file for this. We're going to need to do this. And I was like, I have no idea what that is. I'm going to need your help with that. And we collaborated and we got the thing done. On the day of the move, we were feeling ready. We had relocation team t-shirts for the people who were on the relocation team, and we were ready to go. We had communicated everything to everybody. Everybody's boxes were labeled, but we had a hitch that we did not expect. There was something happened in the server room and it, there was like a minor little explosion in the server room. So on the day of, I had to do some damage control. I was like, oh my goodness. I had to go, I had to call an electrician and I actually had to get someone who could get me an electrician who was available on short notice on the weekend, cuz we were moving over the weekend. And I got the electrician in. Thankfully he fixed the problem. Mm-hmm. And we were able to continue our move without any issues. But that only happened because I had planned everything else out so well. So with that said, the move went off not without a hitch, but hitches were had, but they were managed because we had the planning and the foundation in place. And at the end of the day, we got everything done. Everything got from point A to point B, and we had a successful move. And I was actually promoted. It set me on a path to growth. So it set me on a path to get assigned more projects that maybe someone else wouldn't be able to take on. I became the person who took troubled projects on because I was able to handle something of that caliber, and it put me on the map as somebody who could do this. From that experience, I really learned a lot, and I learned that I couldn't rely on myself, just me, to try to figure all those things out. There's no way I could have had all that expertise myself. So if you're looking for somebody who is a team player at her core and actually really wants to get other people involved and help use the expertise of the people around me, that's one of the things that I do really well. The end. Story 1, very short, very boring. Story 2, humorous, more engaging, gets people more along for the ride. It shows a bit of vulnerability. So it's showing, hey, you know what, you, you didn't always have it all figured out. You didn't know always what was going on. You had a hitch happen. Like you had a bit of a panic situation and you handled that. It takes you on for a little ride of my life. This is what happened. And this is what people are usually afraid to do. But these are the stories that will actually get you hired. They will directly have somebody engaged in what you're saying. And when someone is engaged in what you're saying, they are now releasing different chemicals in their brain that are saying, hey, you know what? That this person is somebody we want around. We want them in a crisis. We want them, we want them when we need to figure these kind of things out. We want someone like that. That is what I was able to bring to the table just in a story that I told that maybe was like four minutes long. This story alone got me into into many other jobs after this. Stories like this will create your career for you. The star method may be dead, but it can be revived. I just showed you how. If you would like to learn more about how to create emotional resonance in an interview. It is part of my 90-minute free training, which you can sign up for below. It is mechanism number 3, and I talk to you all about story resonance, why it's so necessary, why you will stand out with it, why it is one of the things that people can't put their finger on exactly why they wanted to hire you, but they do. They feel drawn to you because of the way that you told the story. Stories make people fall in love with you. Stories make people want to bring you back for second rounds, and stories ultimately make people want to make the commitment to you. If you have a story but it doesn't resonate emotionally, it will fall flat. It will not work when you're up against other candidates. When you're down to the last 2 to 3 people, there needs to be different factors that make you stand out. Get that training. It's free. It's 90 minutes. I talk to you about 4 mechanisms that will help you land the job. The first one is dedicated to those of you who are not getting any interviews right now. You're not getting interviews, you're feeling like opportunities are scarce. Second, third, fourth are the mechanisms that help you close the offer. You will need to do more than most candidates are doing, and by that I do not mean get more certifications or get more experience or get more of some knowledge of software. You need to communicate, what you already have, and I show you how to do that. I've helped candidates from all over the world land higher-paying positions with these tools. Don't miss out. Grab that workshop now. You can start watching it immediately.