A One-Stop Center for Guidance, Strategies, Tips and Tricks on All Things Job Search
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The Job Search Classroom
A One-Stop Center for Guidance, Strategies, Tips and Tricks on All Things Job Search
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** Accomplishment Stories **
Employers are interested in what you can do for them. One way of gauging that is to learn of what you have done
in your previous employment, specifically achievements and accomplishments. Preparation for networking
and interviewing involves preparing stories of your accomplishments so that you can cite and describe them
as appropriate in conversations. Written preparation of these stories is recommended so that you can
refine these stories into concise, impactful language that can feed confident responses in an interview situation.
You will want to have recalled them and thought through their recollections long before getting in front of a
hiring manager.
The stories also have the role of demonstrating your repertoire of skills and experiences relevant to the position
being pursued. A nice summary of skills employers value can be seen
here.
To this end, you will want choose and tailor your stories of accomplishments to provide evidence of your relevant
skill set and experience base.
The stories can be expansions of accomplishments highlighted on your resume and/or supplemental examples of
demonstrated behavior that an interviewer might want to probe in an interview (e.g. "tell me about when you led a
team…"). There are a few guidelines for helping you think about and prepare your stories. The popular ones
have acronyms such as STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) or SOAR (Situation, Obstacle, Action, Result). But
as you'll see they all revolve around describing a situation or problem you were confronted with, where you took
some action, and how that action resulted in creating a better situation than previously existed. Or said another
way, what was the problem you solved, how did you solve it, and what was the result.
Here are some specifics on how each of these techniques can be executed.
This is a model promoted by Lee Hecht Harrison, an executive Outplacement Management Firm
Do at least 10-12 if you have several years work experience. Even if less work experience, examples from personal life could work if captured well, and reflective of applicable skills and abilities that could be valued by the interviewing employer.
With long work experience, several stories should be possible. However, remembering them all, with key details may be difficult. The first tip to refreshing them in your memory is to look at past performance review writeups, if you have them. Often they contain lists of objectives and results for the time frame reviewed, typically each year. A second tip is to catch up with colleagues from past job assignments and reminisce about issues you tackled together.
Force yourself to write them out trying to keep them to 3-5 minutes when read aloud. Whichever format you use, try also to write a 1-3 sentence accomplishment summary that headlines the story in case a shorter version would be more appropriate.