Preparing your success stories for job interviews

With more than 0.5m university students about to head into graduate scheme recruitment processes or thinking about roles for after graduation, and college students also weighing up whether work or further study is for them, now is exactly the right time to be preparing your success stories for job interviews.

But when you have limited experience of the world of work, how do you do that?

As a career coach, I’ve worked with dozens of young people looking for their first job, as well as helping others to prepare personal statements for university. I support people at all levels of seniority, including board members, but it’s often much harder for those in the early part of their career to think of the examples they need.

Look broadly for transferable skills employers want

My number one tip for anyone without a decent career history to draw on is to look at skills in their broadest sense.

Step one is to identify the kind of role you’re looking for and see what skills they want – you can extract them from the advert and role description. You could also take a look at this resource from Prospects, listing likely interview questions for graduates to give you an idea about what you might be asked. Step two is to map your experience to those skills.

Look as broadly as possible at your life experience to find examples of the skills the employers are looking for. If you’re a gamer and play collaboratively doing missions with friends, that’s problem-solving and teamwork. If you work a part-time job and are often asked to work shifts at short notice, that’s flexibility plus the ability to prioritise and manage your time by juggling your studies alongside those demands.

What other life experiences have you had that you can draw on? Think about work, your studies and your hobbies. Maybe you’ve done volunteering or are part of a society at college or uni which gives you some stories to tell. Without full-time experience to draw on, think creatively about how you can show you have the skills employers want.

Record and map your success stories

Once you’ve started to identify the stories you can use, you need to keep a record of them. I recommend you do this in the form of a table, with the skill on the lefthand side, and your stories, plus evidence on the right. You might find that your stories fit across multiple skills. That’s great, because if you’ve already used one story at interview, you’ll have another to draw on for the next skill you’re asked about.

Collect as many examples as you can and keep the table as a living record, adding to it whenever you think of a good example. This is a great habit to get into throughout your career as it’s so easy to forget things as you get busy.

Make sure you can evidence impact

Having a story is one thing, being able to evidence the impact of your skill is another.

When it comes to evidence, think about how your actions made a difference. Maybe you helped a customer with a tricky issue, resulting in them thanking you for your efforts. Perhaps your sports team’s coach held you up as an example of great teamwork and gave specifics about what you did that others should emulate. If you had a great idea which helped you and your mates solve the latest mission while gaming, explain how it made the difference.

You’re looking to show outcomes, how things were different as a result of your actions. If you have feedback from other people about what you did, that’s brilliant, but you can also state facts about situations which show your impact – always cashing up accurately at the end of a shift (attention to detail) so the company’s records were accurate, for example.

Now is the time to put some effort into gathering examples of your skills. As a student, whether at college or university, you’ll soon be absorbed in the exams and coursework needed to complete your course. But as graduate recruitment scheme interviews also kick off in earnest at this time of year, you could be juggling the competing priorities of finishing your studies and trying to land that dream role, so now is the time to do the thinking.

For help with preparing your success stories for job interviews, drop me an email.