Interviewing Is Story Curation

When an organization interviews a candidate for a job opening the interviewer is most often focused on a candidate’s skills and experiences. It’s too seldom understood that the most valuable and impactful interviews go beyond these basic components to include a greater sense of the candidate’s professional story, inclusive of their values and motivations. This means asking better questions and practicing much deeper listening and conversational reflection and mirroring.

A more powerful wheilding of the interview process can be found in exploring the intersection of the candidates professional and personal story arc and the organizations own story and narrative direction. To capture that value, the interview must move beyond a skills and experience inventory and inspection approach to venturing into deeper waters.

 Much like a movie director pulls the context and meaning out of a script to transform it and create an impactful experience on screen, interviewers can work within a larger frame that creates a broader landscape for both the candidate and the hiring organization. It allows both parties to attain better clarity and a sense of the potential opportunity related to joining into one another’s stories. In most organizations, there is room to develop interviewing skills to be more impactful and foster the benefits that come from becoming intentional story curators.