When Eventbrite was tiny, the online-ticketing company wouldn’t hire anyone until co-founder Julia Hartz took stock of the leading candidate. Today, San Francisco–based Eventbrite employs more than five hundred people—and sells more than forty million tickets a year. If you’ve ever bought a ticket to a beer-tasting festival, a fringe-theater production, or a webinar, you’ve probably done business with Eventbrite. Amid all of the company’s rapid growth, however, one custom has endured. Before anyone gets a job offer, he or she needs to meet with Hartz. It’s a short but crucial conversation, centered on a simple request:
“Tell me your story.”
When Hartz poses that challenge, she is willing to hear anything. No response is automatically right or wrong. What she’s looking for, as she explained to me over lunch one day, is a sign of each person’s motivation, stumbles, ambitions, and heroes. Responses can cover everything from your hometown to the time you hiked the Appalachian Trail. The more she knows about what makes you tick, the easier it is to ensure that if you’re hired, you will be slotted into the right sort of job and be managed in an authentic, effective way. As Hartz often tells candidates, “Your résumé chronicles your background in black and white. Now I want to hear about it in color.”
For anyone with an eclectic liberal arts background, the invitation to tell your story is an unparalleled chance to shine. This is the moment when hiring stops being a grim-faced hunt for candidates with the safest résumés—and instead becomes an optimistic search for newcomers with potential. If you’re lucky, the question will be an obvious, prominent part of the interview, much like the way Julia Hartz poses it. More often, the opportunity to tell your story will arise obliquely, and you will need to be mindful of entry points that aren’t always obvious. Either way, seizing command of the situation helps you avoid the frustrating rebuff “We don’t think you have enough experience.” It’s your opportunity to build instead toward a happier finish, with recruiters or hiring managers declaring: “We think you could be really good at this.”
In the next few pages, let’s talk about ways you can make this transformation happen. Some clues already have been sprinkled through earlier chapters. Think of how Sonia Vora won a job at Morningstar by recounting her intellectual jousts in philosophy class. Look at the way Arthur Motch excelled on Wall Street by becoming known as the classics major who was trained to read every footnote. Or consider how Mai-Ling Garcia invoked her sociology training to define herself as a bureaucratic ninja who deserved a shot at co-leading digital-media initiatives with the City of Oakland.
There’s a pattern to these strivers’ success. It’s highly transferable. Knowing how to talk boldly about your own journey can pay off if you’re trying to get a job at a start-up, a giant company, a nonprofit, or a government agency. It doesn’t matter whether your supposedly useless degree is in history, English, sociology, or any other discipline in the humanities or social sciences.
The central insight: At some point in the hiring process, seize an opportunity to explain what makes you tick. By sharing the key moments of your life, you transcend the drudgery of retracing the whats and whens of your résumé. You start to reveal the whys and hows in your life. You share the dreams that inspire you, the hardships you have overcome, or the parts of your personality that make you so distinctive. For the first time in the interviewing ritual, you and your interviewer will feel it’s okay to let go of the standard script and just be human for a few minutes. You start to bring candor and trust into the conversation. If everything goes right, by the time you’ve finished sharing a bit of yourself, the person on the other side of the table will be thinking: We need to hire you.
Your chance to make this connection can arrive at any time, starting with in the earliest stages of your job exploration. Think of casual networking at a party, a wedding, or an airport lounge. (That’s how English major and part-time poet LeAnne Gault caught the attention of a kitchen-appliance CEO who needed a social-media wizard.) Even your cover letter can present an intriguing chance for you to be you. Most commonly, your moment will come partway through standard job screenings, particularly behavioral interviews that focus on the ways you handled specific situations in the past. Rise to the occasion with an answer your interviewer will remember for a long time.
Whatever the setting, you need to get good at talking about yourself. Practice by developing strong responses to the five types of queries that follow below. Drill yourself in at least two or three simulated interviews, either with a career-services professional or with a friend. Get good at telling a long version (and a short one!) of your favorite stories. Bear in mind these opportunities may arise obliquely. Interviewers aren’t perfect. Often, they aren’t fully prepared. When a question is hazy, you can reframe it into something that works to your advantage. After all, this is your interview too.
The Grit Question
How have you dealt with failure? How do you overcome setbacks? Tell me about the longest project you ever worked on.
In recent years, recruiters and hiring managers have loaded their cheat sheets with inquiries like these. They take their cue from Penn’s Angela Duckworth, the psychology professor who has demonstrated the importance of tenacity in everyday life. Her book Grit shares fascinating research about this trait’s benefits in settings ranging from kindergarten to West Point. This line of inquiry sounds terrifying at first, because it seems to draw attention to the weakest aspects of your candidacy. In fact, you should regard this as a showcase opportunity to highlight your appeal.
What your interviewer really wants is a story about a hard-won triumph. If you’ve prevailed in the face of financial troubles, prejudice, or family crisis, let your interviewer know (briefly) about the harshest moment—and then focus on how you battled back. Salute the people who helped you. Finish with an allusion to the ways this tenacity has helped you in college and will help you in the workplace. You create a triple-strength positive impression when you work through such a question, establishing not just your grit, but also your team-building skills and your relevance to the specific job you are seeking. It took about 2,300 words to tell Mai-Ling Garcia’s story in chapter 3, and I’d hate to surrender a single syllable.
You don’t need to be the brave pilot in Sully, the plucky street renegade in Slumdog Millionaire, or other heroes in nail-biting films to make this dynamic work. If you want a refresher on how the darkest details can reinforce your story, pay attention to the way Hollywood defines gritty triumphs in each weekend’s batch of new releases. Even the ups and downs of completing your college major can win an interviewer’s admiration. Ask Tess Amodeo-Vickery, a Wesleyan English major who got hired as a Wall Street analyst, without taking the math and finance courses that dotted rival candidates’ transcripts. “My boss later told me that what impressed him the most was the story I told him about having to fight to keep my undergraduate thesis,” she explained. Her professor thought her topic was too big; she disagreed. Staying up late at night, she cranked out a vastly more detailed outline of her proposal. The prof took a look the next morning—and conceded the point.
Can You Guide People to Yes?
Victoria Taylor wanted the job. I represented one of the last barriers before she could have it. We were sitting in a tiny, windowless conference room at Reddit.com’s headquarters in San Francisco. She aspired to be Reddit’s new community manager, a position with duties that included coordinating the site’s wildly popular Ask Me Anything feature. My role, on that August afternoon in 2013, was to impersonate five versions of agitated site visitors and find out if she could handle the strain.
She parried everything. We argued about everything from atheism to the Boston Marathon bombing. I made up “facts” with impunity and accused Reddit of all sorts of bias. She calmly marshalled counterarguments when they existed and politely wound down the conversation when the craziness reached absurd levels. A week later she was hired. Over the next two years, she took Reddit’s AMAs to greater heights, allowing site visitors to chat with everyone from astronaut Buzz Aldrin to hip-hop legend Nas and movie stuntwoman Laura Dash. Now she is director of digital community at WeWork, a shared-space start-up valued at nearly seventeen billion dollars.
What did Taylor learn as a Marquette student (BA, communications, 2007) that made her right for the rough-and-tumble tempo of Reddit, the self-styled front page of the Internet? Lots of elements of her background stand out, but perhaps the most important was a stint as president of the Milwaukee university’s undergraduate art club. As a junior, she coordinated several art shows at one of Milwaukee’s most elegant museums, which meant intricate protocol, high expectations, and no way of knowing how attendees might react. Long before Reddit came into her life, Taylor had shown she could guide people to yes.
In a behavioral interview, you’re likely to be asked a lot of questions about how you motivate people, deal with conflict, build coalitions, or prevail in hostile settings. It’s rare to be dragged into scenarios as explosive as the Reddit interview, but you can still be quizzed about your capabilities as a leader and as a communicator. Here’s a simple truth to keep in mind. Every leadership question is really about communications. And every communications question is actually a leadership question in disguise. Tie your responses to these questions’ deeper purpose, and you can win both ways.
Think of how Alex Maceda, the Dartmouth classics major, recounted the uplifting (and funny) highlight of her academic trip to Greece, in which she walked the grounds of the Temple of Delphi explaining its mysteries to her classmates. She brought ancient Greece to life so vividly that Australian tourists started tagging along in the mistaken belief she was a certified guide. With such strong presentation skills, it’s no wonder she got a job at Bain, the elite consulting firm, straight out of college. Her panache won her an exemption from the economics/finance track that carries many other graduates into such firms.
Companies always need people who can read the room and inspire others. Showcase those strengths, and you solve a big problem for your next employer.
How Good Are Your Technical Skills?
Shortly after graduating from Indiana University with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, Rachel Allen was hanging out with her parents in Wisconsin when the recruiters started messaging her. They had come across her LinkedIn profile. They liked what they saw. They encouraged her to interview for a job with Qualtrics, the fast-growing Utah market-research company.
Allen doesn’t have a deep background in computer science, the field that comes to mind when most people think of technical skills that you can acquire in college. What she came to realize, however, is that today’s liberal arts curriculum imbues you with a valuable collection of less-famous technical skills too. In her case, she could work comfortably and quickly with analytical tools such as MediaLab, SPSS, Excel, and Qualtrics survey software. She had built spreadsheets; she had analyzed data on everything from sports-fan attitudes to courtroom scenarios. For Qualtrics and its customers, those are winning skills.
Take credit for mastering the research methods involved in any field—and bear in mind that what seems simple and obvious to you may be rare and precious to a future employer. When Patrick Tyler Haas went job hunting in 2013, he thought mainstream employers would yawn at his bachelor’s degree in classics and his master’s in classical archaeology. Not so. He got offers from a consulting firm and a nonprofit focused on global literacy. It turned out his experience organizing field notes in a Greek archaeological dig was highly transferable to both those jobs.
Take note of the way, too, that strivers such as Mai-Ling Garcia improve their job-market prospects by completing relatively brief courses in digital technology from Code Academy, General Assembly, Startup Institute, GrowthX, or other organizations. Most offer a wide range of hybrid specialties such as digital marketing, design, or user experience. These courses straddle the divide between pure technical skills and humanistic strengths such as aesthetics and interpersonal relations. Adding such a workplace credential to your résumé is far quicker (and cheaper) than trying to complete a new college major.
Are You a Good Match for Us?
Peel the entire hiring ritual down to its essentials and interviewers are trying to assess you on three simple dimensions: Can you do the job? Will you do the job? Will you fit in? Of those three, the final one, compatibility, is the hardest one to pin down. It’s also the screening standard most likely to serve as the tiebreaker when organizations are trying to decide among several strong finalists.
In days gone by, employers used awkward ploys to hunt for compatibility. The FBI used to ask prospective agents what books they read until an underground network of tipsters figured out the ideal answer: “Tom Clancy spy novels.” Once word got around, every candidate professed to be a Tom Clancy fan, and the question lost its utility. In other cases, questions about church membership, political views, and other non-work-related topics came to be seen as ill-advised and outright discriminatory. Employers now tend to probe for compatibility with stunningly bland questions that invite you to volunteer whatever aspects of your life and values come to mind. Three of the most common such questions are as follows: What do you know about us? Why do you want to work here? Where do you see yourself in five years?
Seize the initiative! Put your critical-thinking research skills to work and come into the interview having studied not just the organization’s website, but also recent news articles, research reports, and online resources such as Glassdoor, SlideShare, YouTube, and the U.S. Patent Office’s searchable directory. Speak well of the organization but don’t come across as fawning. Steer the conversation toward the organization’s growth aspirations and how someone with your background and skills can make those goals come true faster. Parry the “five years” question (which is out of step with the unpredictable nature of modern jobs) by talking about ways you’d like to help the organization conquer new challenges by advancing beyond your entry-level job.
Most important, establish compatibility by asking thoughtful questions yourself. Ask to hear more about the organization’s most innovative (or controversial) new initiative. Invite your interviewer to share his or her story: getting hired, first month on the job, current duties, best part of the job, advice to new hires. People generally like talking about themselves. Coming across as genuinely interested in the organization counts for a lot.
What’s Fascinating About You?
If sociology major Oliver Meeker hadn’t spent four years in Vietnam, would he still have been as intriguing a hire for IBM? And what about all the other achievers in this book whose zeal, wit, and ingenuity come through—loud and clear—when they share stories about everything from delivering pizza to filming documentaries in Bali?
We’ll never know for sure, but in the noisy stampede of entry-level hiring, you don’t want to be the bland candidate that no one even remembers two hours after the interview is over. Stand out from the crowd, and there’s a lot that can go right. Even if you don’t get the job, your interviewers are more likely to give you a call back and a fresh chance to brainstorm with them about what your next career move should be.
In a plain-speaking world, interviewers would actually ask: “What’s fascinating about you?” Nobody dares be that direct, though. So your opportunity to inject a bit of personality into the conversation is likely to come in the course of standard, seemingly lifeless prompts like these: Tell me about yourself. How do you deal with stressful situations? What’s been your greatest accomplishment? And the notoriously overused classic: What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?
Take your time with each of those questions. You want to start your answer with something directly responsive, establishing yourself as a candidate taking the interview seriously. It’s crucial to find a good fit with the organization and opportunity at hand. Once you’ve covered the basics, though, look for a way to share the robust side of you. Don’t forget to wrap up your anecdote with a verbal bridge that connects your story to the job opening at hand.
In the course of researching this book, I hosted a lunchtime pizza chat with liberal arts majors at Reed College. For the first fifteen minutes, Noah Samel seemed like the quietest of the bunch. He was an English major with strong grades and some experience working in China. Self-effacing to a fault, he described himself as a “one-trick pony” who wasn’t sure how to portray himself to employers. Then I asked about his lodging arrangements in China.
Boom! Out tumbled a story of living illegally in ten-dollar-a-night hotels. Even something as routine as getting his laundry done was full of adventure and terror. Bats swooped down at night, threatening to soil clothes left on a rooftop to dry. Pimps accosted him, certain that he must want a date for the night. When he said no, they screamed insults and tried to break into his room. After barricading his door all night, he showered in the morning and headed into work, doing his best to act as if nothing had happened.
By the time Samel was done, I wanted to hire him. From that moment onward, if anyone asked him about stressful situations, he possessed a story that would enthrall his interviewers. All he needed was permission to be himself. Permission granted.