Your Story Is Your Strategy: How AI Is Changing the Way Talent Gets Discovered, Evaluated, and Hired [Workshop]

​Learn why storytelling is the most underleveraged skill in your job search, how to build a talent profile that works for you before you ever walk into an interview, and how AI is reshaping both sides of hiring.

​Most MBA students think the interview is where you win or lose the job. The reality is that the story you tell — and how well you’ve built it — matters long before you sit down across from a hiring manager. It matters in your resume, in your LinkedIn presence, in the way you describe your experience at a networking event, and in how a recruiter’s AI sourcing tool decides whether your profile even surfaces in the first place.

​The hiring landscape is shifting fast. Companies are building structured talent pools and using AI-powered tools to source, screen, and evaluate candidates well before a human interviewer gets involved. If your professional story is scattered, generic, or buried in buzzwords, you’re invisible to these systems — and to the recruiters who rely on them.

​In this workshop, Sumanta Chakraborty — a UCLA Anderson alum (’10), 25-year technology veteran, and founder of nSpire AI — walks you through both sides of this equation: how to craft your story as a candidate, and how recruiters and AI systems evaluate that story on the other side.

​What you’ll explore:

​• The power of storytelling before the interview — Your professional narrative isn’t just for interview day. It’s the foundation of your resume, your LinkedIn profile, your elevator pitch, and increasingly, your digital talent profile. We’ll cover how to build a consistent, compelling story that positions you for the roles you actually want.

​• Why storytelling during the interview is what separates good candidates from great ones — Recruiters don’t remember bullet points. They remember structured, specific stories that demonstrate how you think, lead, and solve problems. You’ll learn frameworks like STAR and evidence-based response design to turn your experiences into memorable, high-signal answers.

​• How Theo, nSpire AI’s career coach, helps you build your talent profile — Theo works with you before the interview to help you identify your strongest stories, practice delivering them, and refine your responses with real-time AI feedback. But Theo doesn’t just help you rehearse — it helps you build a structured talent profile: an evidence-backed layer of your skills, experiences, and accomplishments that lives in nSpire’s employment ecosystem, making you discoverable and ready when opportunity arrives.

​• How Vera sources and evaluates talent from the pool — On the employer side, Vera is nSpire AI’s sourcing and evaluation engine. Vera analyzes talent profiles in the employment layer, matching candidates to roles based on verified evidence — not keyword games or résumé padding. Understanding how Vera works gives you a strategic advantage: you’ll know exactly what makes a profile stand out and what gets filtered out.

​• The big picture: how AI is creating a two-way talent marketplace — The future of hiring isn’t candidates blasting applications into a void. It’s a structured ecosystem where your talent profile speaks for you, where recruiters find you based on real evidence, and where both sides make better decisions. We’ll discuss what this means for your career strategy starting now.

​The session includes a live demo where students interact with Theo to practice a real interview scenario, get instant feedback, and see how their responses translate into a talent profile that recruiters using Vera would actually evaluate. You’ll leave with a personal storytelling action plan and a clear understanding of how to make the new AI-driven hiring landscape work in your favor.

​Learning Objectives

​1. Craft a cohesive professional narrative that works across your resume, LinkedIn, networking conversations, and interviews — so your story is consistent, compelling, and recruiter-ready before you ever enter an interview room.

​2. Use structured storytelling frameworks (STAR, situation-impact-result) to deliver evidence-based interview responses that give hiring managers clear signal instead of vague impressions.

​3. Build a talent profile using AI coaching tools like Theo — turning your experiences into a structured, evidence-backed profile that lives in an employment layer and makes you discoverable to recruiters and AI sourcing systems.

​4. Understand how AI sourcing tools like Vera evaluate and surface candidates from talent pools — so you can tailor your preparation, your profile, and your story to what modern hiring systems actually measure.

​About Sumanta Chakraborty ('10) — Chief Executive Officer/ Co-Founder of nSpire AI

​Sumanta Chakraborty is the founder and CEO of nSpire AI. Before starting nSpire, she spent 25+ years building products and technologies across companies like NVIDIA, Nuance, Sony, LG, and Siemens — working on systems spanning smartphones, robotics, autonomous vehicles, and speech/NLP platforms. Over time, she noticed a consistent gap: talent is everywhere, but access to opportunity and meaningful guidance is not. nSpire AI was built to address that. They're developing the intelligence layer for the future of hiring — with Theo, an AI career coach helping candidates improve through structured practice and feedback, and Synthia, an AI-powered system that helps companies make better hiring decisions through evidence-based evaluation. Their mission is simple: make personalized career support and better hiring decisions accessible at scale.