Hi I'm Jenny Rae, the Managing Director of Management Consulted, and I'm here today
to talk about heroes stories. Hero stories when preparing for consulting
fit interviews are the best tool that I have found to be able to address any
question that comes at you. We have in our Consulting Interview Bible over 50
questions that are helpful to prepare for, but something inevitably happens.
You walk into an interview having prepared every single one of those questions, and
someone asks you a question that's not on the script. If you're not prepared
with stories to tell, it's very challenging sometimes to build something
on the fly. So this is a tool that I use to both help prepare you to build
stories on the fly in the interview and also to have you walk in the door prepared.
The first thing that's important to know is why it's great to
tell hero stories. A lot of times in interviews you're going to be asked
direct questions. I like to answer with stories for two reasons.
First of all, stories are believable. You're giving them more information voluntarily.
So rather than just saying something, an "I" statement that
could be fabricated, you're giving additional context and additional information.
That additional information lends credibility to your story.
The second reason, which I think is even more important, is that it enables the
interviewer to remember you. When you're in a very tight race with somebody for
one of the slots in a firm. It's important that the interviewer has an
emotional connection with what you talked about, and also can take away some
of the facts. Stories are the most memorable way to be able to do this, and
when they are walking into the hallway and fighting for you, you want to give
them all the ammunition that they need to do that. So those are the two key
reasons why it's important to tell hero stories. There are three real big types
of hero stories that I like to lay out. The first are academic hero stories.
Academic hero stories are incredibly important because they show that in an
academic environment, by which I mean something where you're serving either as
a research assistant or you're in the classroom,
that you're able to work well with other people and drive yourself to
collaborate and solve problems. A lot of times these academic hero stories are
good at demonstrating consistency of excellence across multiple different spheres.
The second type of hero stories are leadership hero stories. These are in
non-graded and unpaid environments, usually extracurricular activities on
campus or if you're off-campus in the community. These leadership experiences
are things that will highlight some of the skills that you've got working with
people and defining something when nobody is driving you to do it.
So it's really important to have some leadership stories prepared. The third type are work
experience hero stories, and these hero stories are by far the most important.
They're the most relevant, probably the closest to what you would actually be
doing in consulting, and also the reason that they would generally hire you
would be from some of the skills that you're demonstrating, in these hero stories.
So make sure that if you're preparing some hero stories you have at
least these three areas covered: academic, leadership, and professional experience,
but also, that you actually are able to go back and make sure that you cover the
professional experience even more than those. In general we recommend building
six hero stories, because that gives you enough practice building them that it
makes it easy to build them on the fly. And in general, you have enough to tell
three hero stories in one interview, three hero stories in another interview,
and you don't have to reuse any in the same interview round.
Now it's important to understand how you actually build a hero story, and we use a pretty
straightforward method -- I call it the CAR method. The CAR method is context,
action, and results. I'm just going to break down what I mean by each one of
those really quickly. For context, I mean the project scope. So what you are trying
to solve as at the project scope. The second is the team size. So who is on the
team, and how many people were there? The third is your role, so with the role,
how did you fit into the team? Were you just one of the gang? Were you somebody
who is in a direct leadership position? Then finally, what was the key
problem that you faced? So, not necessarily the overall problem or issue,
but the key problem you faced that you directed and solved. The second part are actions.
Inside those actions, I really want
to see, not what you did as a team, no "we" statements here, just "I" statements.
What did you do to drive this issue to a favorable conclusion?
So here specifically it's the specific steps you took to resolve the issue, and it's
important in this case to be very clear, which is another reason why it's good to
prepare for hero stories. Finally, results. Consultants are all about results.
You can't just say here was a problem and here's what I did without
telling me what happens next. So it's important that you pick stories that
have good and happy endings, and that you show what you did to drive the results
to a positive outcome. A couple of other important things to remember about
hero stories, the first, is that you want to make sure that you're focusing on
your most relevant and recent experience. Hopefully there's overlap between the
two of those. Hopefully the most recent experience that you have is also the
most relevant, but if that isn't the case, you do want to focus on the most
relevant experience first, and then make sure that you're still ready to address
at least one or two stories from your most recent experience, even if they're
not the first ones that you pull out of the bag. The next thing that's important
to remember is that you want to have 30 second to 1 minute responses. 30 second to 1 minute
responses are critical because if you're telling the story, you don't
want to be long-winded. You don't want to draw it out. You want to tell a really
vivid picture of exactly what you did. And then finally, and perhaps most
importantly, you want to tell these stories with enthusiasm. When you're
talking about your experiences -- about how you solved a challenging problem and
came out as the hero of the day. You don't want to tell them with lackluster
emphasis or as if it was the worst thing you ever did. You want to talk about them
with pride and enthusiasm, with confidence. What that conveys is that
give you a problem that is similar to this one or even bigger and you're going
to take the same actions and come up with the same positive results.
Hero stories are an amazing way to prepare for fit interviews.
And if you've got any other questions just visit us at our website Managementconsulted.com.