Tell me a story

Today, and for the next couple of days, I am interviewing candidates to serve as Student Ambassadors for the university.  Ambassadors give 99% of our campus tours to prospective students, and often are the only students these campus visitors will genuinely interact with.  It's an incredibly important job, and a prospect's ambassador experience can sometimes even determine whether they will apply, or ultimately attend, the university.  

I read somewhere that one hiring manager's favorite interview question wasn't even a question, but a command of four little words : "Tell me a story."  It's an intriguing concept, requiring something completely unplanned and unstructured, something "real," and it's exactly the type of thing I would do.  So today, before any and all other questions, I looked at each candidate and asked them to tell us a story.  

At first they would look at me with that unique combination of "terror," and "he has to be joking." They'd usually ask "What kind of story?" or "Can it be about me?"  And then, as the panic subsided, they thought about it for a second, and .... something wonderful happened: they opened up, like a freshly cracked walnut.  We learned how one candidate bonded with a ten year old at a camp this past summer.   Another told us about how they came to have a crippling phobia of bodies of water - and fish, in particular.  A third recounted how she had come to fall in love with music after teaching herself to play the piano, and my favorite told the story of how she adopted a stray cat that behaved like an angel during the day and turned into a hellion at night, climbing her walls (yes, with it's claws) and destroying everything in sight.  So she did what any dutiful child would do ... she gave the cat to her parents. 

And then I found five dollars.