GET THE JOB
Professional Self-Coaching for Job Interviews
Tell the Three Stories That Reveal Your Professional Value, Character and Potential
Prepare the Success, Failure and Passion Stories Every Interviewer Remembers
You have an interview. It matters. You know you have the experience. You know you can do the job. What this resource gives you is the ability to communicate who you are in a way interviewers remember.
Interviews rarely fail because someone lacks experience. They fail because employers cannot see the person behind the experience — the thinking, the learning and the motivation that shape how that experience will show up in the future. This resource takes you, step by step, from your experience to three prepared professional stories that reveal exactly that — so you walk into your interview able to communicate your value, your character and your potential with clarity and confidence.
Get the Job distils more than twenty years of professional coaching, writing and practice into a structured method that enables you to coach yourself through one important professional challenge. It captures the thinking, the sequence, the questions and the frameworks a coach would bring to hours of one-to-one work — and places them in your hands, to work through in your own space and time.
Who This Is For
Someone with an interview they care deeply about. You may have days to prepare, or a week — it works to your timeline, with preparation schedules built in for a week away, three days away, and tomorrow. Everything in it is designed to be completed by you, in your own space and time. All you need is somewhere to write — paper or screen, whichever is your preferred way of working. You finish interview ready.
What You'll Learn
- Why employers remember professional stories more clearly than lists of qualifications and achievements
- How to identify the success, failure and passion stories within your own experience — and dig past your first answer to the insight underneath
- How to build each story with a powerful beginning, an engaging middle and a memorable ending
- How to adapt your three stories naturally to fifteen common interview questions while keeping their core intact
- How to practise so your stories feel natural on the day — prepared, in your own voice
- How your three stories combine to reveal your value, character and potential — and give you a complete answer to "tell me about yourself"
How This Self-Coaching Resource Works
Get the Job is built in three parts, nine steps.
Part One — Identify Your Three Stories
- Step 1 — Identify Your Success Story
- Step 2 — Identify Your Failure Story
- Step 3 — Identify Your Passion Story
Part Two — Build Your Three Stories
- Step 4 — Craft Powerful Beginnings
- Step 5 — Develop Engaging Middles
- Step 6 — Create Memorable Endings
Part Three — Prepare for the Interview
- Step 7 — Adapt Your Stories to Different Interview Questions
- Step 8 — Practise Until Your Stories Feel Natural
- Step 9 — Reveal Your Professional Value, Character and Potential
Every step asks the questions that bring clarity, and every step ends in writing — that's what self-coaching means here: you find your own answers, and the work is yours. By the final page you will have three completed professional stories that didn't exist before you began — ready to use in your interview.
Throughout, you'll follow James, a project manager with fifteen years of experience who spent eight months interviewing without a single offer. His answers were clear, accurate, professional — and indistinguishable from every other candidate's. They were also forgettable. Everything changed in one interview when he stopped listing achievements and started telling the stories behind them. Three days later came the offer — a 20% salary increase, and something more valuable: a repeatable method. That method is what follows. At each step, you'll see how James worked through it before you work through it yourself.
Why These Three Stories
Three stories give an interviewer the complete picture:
Your Success Story demonstrates the distinctive impact you create.
Your Failure Story reveals your capacity for growth and judgement.
Your Passion Story communicates the motivation that drives your work.
Any one of these alone is a partial picture. Together, they show an interviewer where you've struggled and learned, what you can accomplish, and why it matters to you. That combination is what makes a candidate memorable.
What You Finish With
- Three completed professional stories — success, failure and passion — each with a powerful beginning, an engaging middle and a memorable ending
- A question map connecting your stories to fifteen common interview questions, with a prepared way into each
- Three lengths of every story — a 30-second essence, a 2-minute version and an extended version — with nine anchor sentences that let you tell each one naturally
- Your thread — the professional identity that runs through all three stories
- Your integrated answer to "tell me about yourself," built from your own experience
- Your Interview Page — a single page to review on the morning of your interview: fifteen sentences and a question map, with a complete story standing behind every one
About Professional Self-Coaching
Self-coaching is the ability to guide yourself through every part of your WorkLife journey — through stable times and times of change and uncertainty. It is asking yourself the questions that bring clarity, finding your own answers, and acting on what you learn.
Each Professional Self-Coaching resource is created for one important professional moment. One purpose. One challenge. One outcome. The thinking, frameworks and practical guidance within each resource are distilled from the School of WorkLife programmes — a body of work developed through twenty years of practice — and focused entirely on helping you prepare for the moment in front of you. Every resource strengthens the three abilities at the heart of School of WorkLife: self-coaching, self-directing and self-leadership.
Get the Job is drawn from The Art of WorkLife Storytelling: Creating Three Fundamental Stories That Define Your Identity — the complete programme exploring how the stories we tell shape the way we communicate who we are at work: our values, our thinking, our experiences, and what we stand for.
About School of WorkLife
School of WorkLife creates story-based learning resources that help people think more clearly about the challenges, conversations, and decisions that shape a working life.
Each story is drawn from real WorkLife situations and developed into practical learning experiences that combine narrative, reflection, and structured application.
Author's Note
The stories I write are based on real WorkLife challenges, obstacles and successes. Persons and companies portrayed in the stories are not based on real people or entities. Carmel O' Reilly. www.schoolofworklife.com