Brand Yourself -- What's Your Story?

Interviews are story-telling sessions.

To give a great interview, to be a great candidate, you have to have two things: great experience and a great story. Great experience without the ability to pull together a coherent tale to contextualize that experience, will at best position you as a do-er, not a leader. Contextualizing experience and making it relevant is how you help someone see why you are better for the role than someone else. By the time you have an interview, you have been filtered for broad experience, the context of that experience and how you present your unique story and its relevance is what you have to do to get the job.

Context is everything.

Great brands are not great because they represent great products and have great features and benefits. Lots of products have great features and benefits just like lots of people have an education and skills. A great brand connects. This connection happens through value proposition that makes you care.

Your story can express your value proposition which is more than a list of skills and experiences. Making a connection between a brand and people is not done through a list of anything, it's done by connecting on an emotional level. How can you connect yourself to the interviewer and to the kind of role you want next?

Passion with reasons to believe.


Let's assume you're smart, educated and have worked at great places. The next thing you need to is passion. Passion -- really caring -- makes other people care too. If you are passionate about your work,  it holds a lot of sway on how people will feel about you as a candidate. But where passion can hurt instead of help is if you fail to marry passion to context. Interviewers don't want to just hear how you love something, but why exactly you are great at it in a way we can believe. Really being passionate about the role you're interviewing for is great, but only if you can be persuasive about how it fits with your previous experience.

Reasons-to-believe is where the rubber hits the road.

Passion without reasons to believe is like someone being excited about the prospect of winning the lottery -- unrealistic and tedious to listen to.




Shannon Mullen Copyright ©