The Five-Sentence Interview
Use this structure from Shakespeare to get the job you want.
You are applying for a job. You‘ve made it all the way to the big interview. When your interviewer asks you about a project you worked on... how do you reply?
Every way of telling the story seems fraught: too much detail and the interviewer will doubt your ability to understand and prioritize what is actually important. Too little information and no one will care. If you only talk about the successful parts then everything will ring false. And yet perseverating on all the problems you faced runs the risk of making you sound like an insufferable complainer. So what do you do?
Instead of underselling, overstating, or hiding the problems you encountered, deploy the five-act structure from Shakespeare’s plays.
The first step is to turn each “act” into a single sentence adapted to the journey of shipping a project. Combine the five sentences to tell a story of what you learned (not just what you did) and how it transformed your understanding of the world, your career, and your entire workplace. This will create a story that has the interviewer rooting for you to win.
Here’s the template for your story. I’ve described what needs to happen in each section... Notice how 80% of the story is struggle.
ACT I We had a problem.
It was bigger than we thought.
It was critical to the business.
ACT II Initial Failure.
We thought we knew how to fix it. Easy, right?
But our first attempt was a total failure.
ACT III We realized we were wrong.
We were thinking about it incorrectly. What we thought was the problem wasn’t the real problem. We made a second attempt. There were signs of progress, but it wasn’t enough.
ACT IV We solved the deeper problem.
And then we saw a way to solve the real problem. We finally got to the root. We kept asking why, digging into what customers were saying, and re-examining the data until we found out what was really happening. Every problem is a search for truth. Once you discover the truth, the real truth, then you have a shot at success.
ACT V Transformative Results:
Big impact, transformational for the business.
Changed how we go forward.
Here’s a real example from a decade ago… A guerrilla marketing project we did at Twitter to steal multiple minutes of airtime at halftime during every game of the World Cup…
ACT I
We needed the world to know Twitter was where you could discover what’s happening for the World Cup, but everyone thought of Facebook when they thought of social media.
ACT II
We had budget for making a video, but in our hearts knew a single video wasn’t going to do anything against the giant marketing force of Facebook’s huge platform and expert team.
ACT III
People were watching the game, not thinking about us, so we had to find a way to insert ourselves into the game if we wanted to win, but we had a budget of $8-10k, which wasn’t going to buy even one half of one nano-second of airtime.
ACT IV
So instead of buying airtime, we built a video broadcast tool that grabbed the latest Tweets and piped them into broadcast-quality motion graphics with the reporter’s name credited at the top and gave the tool for free to every TV reporter covering the games.
ACT V
During halftime of each game, the reporters flashed our info-graphics on the screen talking about the major Tweets of the moment and the conversation brewing around them, and even though our total reach was much smaller than Facebook’s, we gave what they needed to look good in the moment, and so in return they gave us for free minutes and minutes of very expensive airtime.
Your Turn…
Look through your own projects and find moments where you figured out that the normal way, or expected way, wouldn’t get you what you wanted… and show you had to learn some new aspect of the larger system at work and create a new way forward. It could be a learning story, an underdog story, an innovation story, a rock-bottom story, or a third-door story.
Whatever you do, construct a journey that lands somewhere unexpected and shows your flexibility of mind, creativity, resilience, and brilliance.
Job Boards
Here are a few free resources for good jobs in tech. I’m biased towards Sequoia, of course, but I’ve listed a bunch here because that’s what I’d want someone else to do for me.
jobs.sequoiacap.com
jobs.a16z.com
jobs.greylock.com
jobs.accel.com
Final Note: The Gift of Practice
Interviewing for a job is hard. Telling a compelling story is hard. It takes practice. And what makes the problem even worse is that you can’t sound so rehearsed that you sound insincere. You have to deeply know your stories, so that you can deliver them with ease. Spontaneous telling. Not memorization—but embodied, in the moment telling. If you want to workshop your stories, call this number. It’s free.
24-Hour Story, Art, and Design Hotline
(call my Digital Mind and talk to my Delphi)
+1 (650) 675-5734