The debrief comes back through the recruiter, sanded down to nothing. Strong candidate, we went with someone who had more senior leadership experience. You have been leading for years. You ran the exact thing they asked you about. Nobody will tell you which forty seconds of your answer did it.
The audit is a thing I already teach, and it does not start with your stories. It starts with the job description.
Read the job description three times, not once
Read it three times with a highlighter. I call it the Three-Pass Method, and each pass has its own color and its own job.
- Green for every requirement you can meet with a real story and a result behind it. These are your strengths, and these are the stories you lead with.
- Yellow for the requirements you can meet but have not obviously proven, the threads that connect to something you did in an adjacent context. Give the yellow pass thirty distraction-free minutes, because most of your differentiation is hiding in it.
- Pink for the genuine gaps. Then go mine your volunteer work, the committee you sat on, the side project, the stretch assignment nobody asked you to take. No one meets one hundred percent of a senior job description. The work is to shrink the pink and stand on the green.
Underneath the requirements is the question the description never states plainly. What is this role quietly there to fix? Answer that in two sentences and it becomes the through-line of every room you walk into.
Then, and only then, audit the stories
Only after the three passes do you audit the stories, and the standard is the one in my story bank. Choose five or six of your strongest wins and write each one as three things: the situation, the move you made, and the number that resulted. Not a brag sheet, a financial brief.
"Cut onboarding time by thirty percent by rebuilding the handoff between sales and ops" is a story you can tell in one breath and defend for ten minutes. If a story has no number, build the before and after. If it has no move that was yours, use "I" and not "we" until you find where you actually decided something.