Want to stand out in a crowded job market? Tell your leadership story

A simple story structure to help you leave a lasting impression

by Ryan Rumsey

If you’re a design leader who has taken the management career path, you've likely thought about getting a new gig, and you've probably thought about "standing out."

Standing out is really important, but being told that probably isn’t very useful to figuring out how.

Let’s talk about differentiating yourself in the job market as a design leader

Before I get into it, if you need a job to have your basic needs met, that is a very different situation than finding the perfect job. It's very convenient if you have the affordance to pick the kind of job you want.

That said, you want to stand out and be true to yourself when you get that job, so you’re not spiraling afterward. No one likes finding out their brand-new job is gonna suck.

If we think about the hiring process, it generally goes like this:

• the hiring manager identifies a need
• the hiring manager gets approval to hire a new employee
• the hiring manager posts the job description
• the hiring manager and team conduct a bunch of interviews
• the hiring manager and team select their preferred candidate
• the hiring manager offers the job to the preferred candidate

Now… when a job opens up, hiring managers and teams will often interview dozens of candidates, if not more, to find the right fit. That means the hiring manager is listening to candidate stories over and over again. And when it comes to Design Managers, Directors, or Executives, most stories are the same.

If 20 candidates are interviewing for a management role, the majority of them tell a very similar story. It goes something like this:

• Here’s a story of why design is important
• Here’s a story about what are customers needed
• Here’s a story of our design process

There’s nothing inherently wrong with these stories or the candidates. The candidates are nice people. The stories are fine. Yet, it’s really hard to distinguish how those candidates will help address the core needs the hiring manager identified in the first place.

Worse, wondering why they’re not getting calls or offers, candidates continue to use the same story structure in interview after interview. As a result, they lose their confidence along the way. It’s so devastating to lose confidence at a time when you’re trying to remain hopeful.

(Really, the whole hiring process has all sorts of major issues that interviewing alone doesn’t address, but this is about )

So, what do you do?!? Tell a different story that only you can tell.

There’s a format of storytelling in design and tech that has been very successful in pitching ideas, pushing stakeholders to innovate, and talking about the needs of customers. People like Donna Lichaw share all sorts of materials to help you tell these stories. It’s a good format, yet all of these stories share one thing in common; they are meant to inspire an audience with a narrative structure.

Friends, hiring a new employee is not an inspiration session, it is a decision-making process. By incorporating a more analytical structure, you can present your argument in a way others understand.

When interviewing, your goal is to get that hiring manager (and team) to make the decision that you’re the right person for the job and to hire you. Those hiring managers might be cool with your inspirational story, but they WANT to know why you made the decisions you did. They want to know the specific challenges you faced. They’re figuring out if you can deal with the stuff they’re struggling with now. It’s not so much that your team did some service design by why service design was the right option to address a real-world problem. They also NEED to know the results of your decisions. Like… did it actually work?!?

And, you want to position yourself in a way that’s true to you. You want to know that the hiring manager is ready for someone like you, will support you, and won’t spend the first 18 months asking you to explain why you were hired in the first place. You NEED an additional story format to strengthen your position and differentiate yourself.

Enhance your leadership story with the SCR framework

Remember, showing why you’ve deliberately made decisions in the past shows how you’re uniquely different in the job market. Since hiring is a decision-making meeting, try incorporating the SCR format of storytelling.

An excellent communication structure can make or break your presentation. One of the most famous and heavily used analytical storytelling structures is called The Pyramid Principle.

Developed by Barbara Minto, the Pyramid Principle takes the essential elements of a story and organizes them into a pyramid structure to make them easy for someone else to understand. Using a pyramidal structure, you can present your argument by framing the challenge you were facing, summarizing your logical reasons for action, and ordering the arguments in a way that makes sense to the interviewing team.

The Situation-Complication-Resolution (SCR) Framework is very learnable and very successful in job interviews. If you’re familiar with the 5 paragraph essay structure , the SCR Framework is quite similar in its base but includes flexibility to adjust accordingly. The beauty of this framework is that it can be tailored for specific circumstances in which a decision needs to be made.

To tailor it for job interviews, add one additional R to the structure, and it becomes 6 bullet points:

• Situation: Share the job you were hired to do
• Complication #1: Share a challenge you faced while trying to do your job well
• Complication #2: Share another challenge you faced while trying to do your job well
• Complication #3: Share a third challenge you faced while trying to do your job well
• Resolution: The actions you took to do your job well despite those challenges
• Results: The results of your efforts

What's particularly lovely about this structure is we can still leverage the more inspirational and narrative stories about our work within the Resolution itself. What this combination of analytic and narrative does for us is it provides a concise and succinct way to share the context of why you made the decisions you did before getting into the details of bringing those decisions to life.

A script for differentiating yourself and telling your leadership story

When you write down the answers to those prompts, you can tell an entirely different story about your experience that only you can tell. Imagine walking into an interview and telling this story:

• I was hired to scale an existing design team (Situation)
• I arrived on January 13, 2015; 13 days after the fiscal year started, so all budget and headcount for the year were set, and I could not make changes (Complication #1)
• The organization I was in was required to reduce operational costs by 8% (Complication #2)
• I inherited a team of designers from someone who was fired, and the team has various understandings of that situation. They were also uncertain about their future at the company as well. (Complication #3)
• I took responsibility for assembling the strategy and creating a cross-functional movement for change thru small, well-focused experiments (Resolution)
• As a result of our work, user engagement increased by 23%, CSAT by 38%, we reduced those operations costs by 8%, our product teams increased their velocity on average by 10% across all projects, and we introduced a new formative way of working for IT projects moving forward that is still in place today (Results)

When sharing a story like this, you can do it on one slide or in 3 minutes. That leaves a whole lot of room for the interviewing team to ask more relevant questions about you and for you to ask more relevant questions about them.

While you might not get the job, sharing a story that only you can tell leaves a lasting memory for others. Differentiating yourself is about being memorable, someone others talk about after the interview. And that kind of positioning can help you stand out in the crowd.

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