SHARE Stories Activity

In this video, Laura explains how to use the SHARE formula to further enhance your interview preparation.

Transcript

Let’s dig into the share formula in more detail. I’ve provided you with this downloadable resource that you can use for your reference while you’re preparing your interview stories or as Barb described them as scenarios. So here you’ll find the format in more detail. We’ve got the situation, hindrance, action, result and evaluation all mapped out so you can take a look at that.

And then keep in mind that this is just rough notes for your interview. I always am an advocate of putting your thoughts just into point form, short form, point form, so that it’s not overly rehearsed. Because if you try to memorize something, you want to try to convey it perfectly in the interview, you’re going to stumble over your words and that’s going to mess you up. So really you want to think about this as though it’s just, you know, quick talking points that are put together in a framework that allows you to tell your story more effectively.

And so you want to put these notes together for each scenario or for each story. And then when you get to that interview stage, after you’ve practiced, whether it’s in front of a mirror or talking to some friends or a coach, you want to be able to try to convey these stories within two to three minutes. You want to try to get them down so they’re nice and succinct. Because if you go on for too long, you’re going to lose your interviewer’s attention. So let’s take into an example.

So here we have a question which is asking us to describe a time you had to use your analytical skills to solve a problem. So in this case, the situation is that we need to build out software for different customers with revolving timelines. The hindrance in this case is that it’s taking a full day to build because human involvement was always required and the systems were disjointed and pulling team members into different directions. So as the action,

As the leader of this team, you’re posing the question, why do we have to involve humans? And this has led to prioritization mapping activity, where you’re looking at the process from beginning to end. You’re able to leverage collections, collective brainstorming in order to determine what needed to be done to automate the process, and then use this to compose a to -do list and methodically tackle each task over two weeks.

This consolidated the systems and removed some tooling to simplify the process. The result of this is that it shaped software build time down from one day to under five minutes, freeing human capital to be spent on more complex high -value functions. So here we have that quantified result. It’s impactful. We can see that this really saved a lot of time in order to free that human capital to be spent on other high value functions.

So the evaluation of this is given the instant time savings, if we were to face a similar issue, we would want to dedicate a day to solving the problem in the beginning rather than tackling it in a piecemeal fashion. So here we have our share story. We’ve put it together. We’ve got our framework. So now we just have to polish it up by practicing. And then we’ll be ready for our interview with the whole roster of these different stories we can share.