Some people make a living by telling stories like marketers, others have to do it but never get paid for it. Don’t they?

A good manager and a storyteller at the same time is potentially a better opportunity in the job market. A renowned book author - Yuval N. Harari, who makes his living by telling stories, says storytelling is the essence of our survival and prosperity.

Storytelling is a skill that largely determines our success at convincing the other side, also during a job interview. Especially leaders and managers should acquire this skill. Always having an anecdote or an example up your sleeve works with employees, their speed of remembering and assimilating information important for sales or business in general. Such managers are remembered.

Steve Jobs talking about the latest model of Iphone was telling anecdotes, sewing a story that remains in the memory for a long time. He left out the complicated technical details because he knew no one would remember them. Most of us are not Steve Jobs and it's not about comparing ourselves to him. Few people are masters of storytelling and this shows that we can and we should polish that skill. Everyone has their own potential which can be developed and trained, preferably with the support of a recruiter or trainer, so that they can suggest which events should be highlighted or omitted or how to condense the story.

        Yuval Harari, an Israeli professor and author of such famous books as Homo Sapiens or Homo Deus, claims that man encodes stories, interesting tales, better than mere facts or numbers. An interesting story affects emotions in a more powerful way than logical thinking, therefore it stays in our consciousness for much longer.

What does a recruitment interview have to do with storytelling? A lot! Some will ask - does this mean we should tell fairy tales? Absolutely NO, truth, but framed in an interesting story with figures, facts, results provided by the way. Storytelling in a job interview is the ability to put together the most important facts about our career and achievements into a short, interesting and digestible story.

The person listening to your story is the potential employer and the recruiter, who both want to get the essence without the unnecessary details.

MODEL STAR

When putting together your story, it is helpful to know the STAR model which is often used by recruiters during an interview. It stands for:

S - Situation

T - Task

A - Action

R - Result

This is one of the models used during a job interview that allows to learn about key moments in a candidate's career, both the successes and failures that have shaped them. According to the acronym S is a question about specific work situations (where and when) from which we move on to T - task, standing for challenges we had. A - are the actions we took set in context (what and how?) to achieve the goal. R - that is the effects of our actions, achievements, on the occasion of which it is worth sharing industry-specific  success indicators.

A knowledgeable, qualified candidate who has not acquired the ability to talk about themselves potentially misses out on many opportunities for a new and interesting job.

For a start, why don’t you tell your story to your colleagues as a training? See what kind of emotions it evokes  :-). Practice makes perfect!