Have you ever gone grocery shopping hungry? You walk in with three items on your list. Twenty minutes later you’re at the checkout with a cart full of stuff that “sounded good” at the time, and somewhere under the extra bar of soap and the impulse-buy snacks, your original three items are buried. Maybe you even forgot one of them.
That’s rambling in an interview, in a nutshell. You walk in with a point to make. Somewhere in the middle, extra details start sounding good, so in they go. By the time you’re done talking, your actual point is buried under everything else you tossed in the cart – and now the interviewer has to go digging for it.
Good news: you can fix this. It just takes a framework and some practice.
Get In, Grab Your List, Get Out
The grocery store thing isn’t just a cute analogy – it’s basically the whole strategy. Walk in, get the specific things you came for, walk out. Nothing extra makes it into the cart, no matter how good it sounds while you’re talking.
Two things make this possible: a framework for telling the story, and getting your nervous system under control so that it’s not driving you to fill every silence with more words. Skip either one and your main point gets buried under stuff you added because it popped into your head mid-sentence.
I tell clients to aim for stories around 60 seconds. Some will run a little shorter, some a little longer, but if you’re closing in on 90 seconds, something snuck into the cart that didn’t need to be there.
My Spin on the STAR Method
STAR is the classic framework for behavioral interview questions, and it’s a solid starting point. But I teach my own version, with a couple of tweaks that actually make it work:
- Setting – Who, where, when. “At my last job” can be the whole thing. You don’t need a paragraph to set the scene.
- Tie it to the question – Be sure to explicitly state, early in the story, what your actually answering. If you’re asked about a tough decision you’ve made, include the words “I had to make the difficult decision to…” towards the beginning. Don’t make them wonder if you heard the question or whether the story is ever going to get to the point.
- Take the shortest path to the ending – Once the setting has been given and the question tied in, move it along. Don’t take the scenic route to your point.
- Action – This is an “I” story, not a “we” story. Use action verbs that show what you actually did, while still giving credit where it’s due.
- Result – Every story needs a happy ending, even if the ending is “I never made that mistake again.” Don’t leave this out. Nobody’s guaranteeing your interview story a season two, so don’t leave it on a cliffhanger.
M’s Story: Letting Go of the Giant Setup
I introduced M, the client I mentioned in an earlier post about interview anxiety, to this framework. Even with STAR in hand, he was still loading up the setting with way more detail than it needed. He’d build this elaborate stage-setting scene before he ever got to the actual point of the story, and by the time he got there, he was 50/50 on whether he even remebered what the question was.
He had to learn that the setup didn’t need to be a production. A sentence, sometimes just a phrase, was plenty to establish when and where something happened. Once he let go of the urge to fully set the scene before getting to the point, his stories tightened up and were a lot easier to follow along with.
The Movie Plot Trick
I got M to that point through an exercise that forces being concise. I had him summarize entire movie plots in one or two sentences.
It sounds difficult, but it isn’t as hard as you might think. Once M realized he could actually do it – that he could take a two-hour movie and boil it down to a sentence – he applied that same skill to his own stories. Suddenly he could compress a whole setup into one line and get to the part that showcased what he was capable of faster. This is something you can practice on your own if being concise is a struggle for you.
Build a Story Library, Not a Script
One of the other things I have my clients do before an interview is to build a small library of go-to stories that could answer a range of questions. I have them give each one a title and practice saying them out loud – without writing a full script. That often goes against my clients’ instincts.
Scripting works against you here. It kills your ability to adapt a story to whatever specific question actually gets asked. If you know the shape of a story instead of a word-for-word version of it, it’s a lot easier to stay out of the produce aisle and keep from tossing in extra stuff just because it sounds good in the moment. I’ve written before about why scripting backfires more than it helps, and the same logic applies here too.
What to Do Today
No time for coaching before your next interview? Here’s your one homework assignment: practice your stories using the STAR format until you can consistently land them under 60 seconds.
Time yourself. If a story runs long, find the part you added because it “sounded good” and cut it. You’re not trying to memorize a shorter script word for word. You’re trying to get comfortable enough with the shape of the story that you stop reflexively tossing extra stuff into the cart.
Rambling Isn’t a Personality Flaw. It’s a Fixable Habit.
If you have ramble in interviews, it doesn’t mean you don’t know your own story. It just means nobody’s taught you how to walk in, grab what you came for, and get out. That’s a skill. Like any skill, it gets better with the right framework and some practice.
If rambling has been quietly costing you job offers, explore our coaching programs or book a free consultation and let’s fix it together.
Want to keep building this skill on your own in the meantime? Subscribe to my free Substack newsletter for a public speaking challenge delivered to your inbox every week.