Craig Wortmann leads the CRS Career Catalyst on Storytelling for Interviews
On Friday, November 15, the CRS community met for an interactive and compelling Career Catalyst. Craig Wortmann, Clinical Professor of Marketing and Executive Director of the Kellogg Sale Institute, presented a workshop on utilizing storytelling for interviewing. Wortmann offered invigorating, hopeful, and confident advice to trainees and faculty of all levels to expand their interviewing capabilities using storytelling. By cultivating stories, Wortmann remarks, we can become skilled and comfortable in our interviews. He emphasized the power of stories, adding that stories have been around before modern language, suggesting that stories are our way to connect with others and share a message. If we are able to connect with people through stories, then interviews offer a prime opportunity to connect with a potential employer or researcher as to why you are a fitted candidate and individual for the position. 
To practice these storytelling skills, Wortmann shared how he puts this into practice. Engaging with the audience, Wortmann showcased how stories communicated through story telling offer the potential employer more insight into the interviewee’s capabilities and creates lasting impressions that make the storyteller stand out in a sea of applicants. To harness these stories Wortmann shared his strategy in compiling an excel document where he records one story a week, binning these stories into a theme: success story, failure story, aspiration story, etc. By doing this, he has cultivated hundreds of stories that serve a purpose and can be utilized to prepare for respective interviews and meetings. This actionable strategy is something that all attendees were able to start immediately following the workshop. If you have the right story, he adds, you can take someone along your journey and show how those experiences aid in your abilities in the desired position.
Wortmann’s expertise in marketing and his ability to connect with young professionals through his storytelling, offered members of the CRS community a captivating Career Catalyst.