Before: The answer that plays it safe
“I’m a bit of a perfectionist, so I can spend too long polishing.”
The humblebrag. It dodges the question and names no real gap.
Bring a rough draft of the story you'll be asked for. Presence Story is a hosted AI coach that turns it into an answer that holds up under real questions.
Start your first story, free →Encrypted, visible only to you, never used to train AI models.
If it happened, tell me what you actually weighed and it goes in.
Presence is a working method, not a course. The draft can be rough: a decision you made, a call you got wrong, half a sentence you're not sure of yet. The coach critiques it against the structure your interview will actually be scored on, asks the questions that fill the real gaps, and hands back a revision in your own words, never inventing a fact or a number.
Been preparing with STAR? Keep it. Presence assigns STAR when the room is scoring execution, and extends it only when the room is scoring something STAR was never built to show. Where STAR works, and where it stops →
Built by a founder with 25 years in technology strategy and governance, including two decades of hiring decisions and search committees. Now building for the other side of the table.
“What’s your greatest weakness?”
“I’m a bit of a perfectionist, so I can spend too long polishing.”
The humblebrag. It dodges the question and names no real gap.
“I delegate too late. I used to keep complex work in my own hands. Now I hand it off early and review at checkpoints, and my last two hires grew faster for it.”
A real weakness, paired with the system that now contains it. The gap becomes evidence of judgment.
The coach, declining to invent a number.
Your draft
“Our billing data lived in a system from 2009 that only two people understood. I got told to move us off it before the vendor contract ended. I mapped every downstream report that touched it, found 40-odd, killed half of them nobody read, and built the migration in three chunks so finance never lost a day. It was a slog but we got the pilot group over.”
Coach
The biggest issue: the story has no result. The draft ends at “we got the pilot group over,” which is the last action, not an outcome. A recruiter screen will ask “and?” and the story has no answer ready. The action itself is proportionate and concrete; keep the “40-odd reports, killed half” texture. Start with the result: what happened after the cutover?
You
“Honestly, I left the company about a month after that weekend. The full cutover happened after I was gone. I never saw the final numbers and I’d be guessing.”
Coach
Then we will not pretend there is one. A story that is honest about where it ends beats a story with a number you cannot stand behind. One question to build that close: on your last day, what had you directly seen change? Anything you observed yourself, anything you would stake your name on.
The finished story ends where the candidate’s own knowledge ends: the pilot group live, the legacy calls stopped, the final cutover named as someone else’s to claim. That refusal is the product. A template cannot ask the second question, and it cannot decline to fill the gap for you.
The coach is the fastest path and the only one that answers back. The other two are free, and the method inside them is identical.
Presence Story
First story free · then $39 for four
The hosted coach. It reads your draft, names the gaps, asks for what actually happened, and revises in your words. Credits never expire, and there's no account until you're ready to run it.
Presence Tools
Free · in your browser
You do the writing, the tools do the structure. Works across all your stories at once and reads the pattern into a Leadership Portrait. No AI, no account, nothing leaves your browser.
The Starter file
Free · for your own AI
One file you drop into whatever assistant you already pay for. The full method as instructions, yours to keep and to read before you run it. No browser needed.
You are preparing before anyone at your company knows you are looking elsewhere. Presence is built so that stays true.
In Presence Story, encrypted and yours alone.
Stories are encrypted at rest, visible only to you, and never used to train AI models.
In Presence Tools, stored only in this browser.
No Presence database of your preparation, and no account. Moving it between devices moves it encrypted, and only you hold the key.
In the Starter file, never ours at all.
It runs inside the assistant you already use, under whatever terms you have with them. Presence never sees that session.
Yours to export or erase.
From Story or from the Tools, whenever you want: take a copy out, or erase it and leave nothing behind. No request form, no waiting period.
Traffic is measured with privacy-friendly analytics: no cookies, no personal data. The free tools use no AI at all, and nothing you write there is ever collected.
The founder spent those 25 years on technology strategy and governance inside research institutions, a field where protecting people’s intellectual work is a professional ethic, not a feature. Presence is built on that habit.