See a photo of Rob, his bio, and Part 1 of this Q&A.

Q&A with Rob Sullivan, Question 2:

Q: You state on your Web site: “the experiences that employers would find most compelling are almost never included in the résumé. Worse yet, these experiences are rarely mentioned in the interview.” Can you give an example of this type of compelling experience — and without giving away all your secrets — give readers a hint of how one indentifies these kinds of compelling stories?

A: Aldous Huxley, the philosopher, once said, “Human beings have an unlimited capacity for taking things for granted.” I would take that one step further:

Human beings have an unlimited capacity for taking themselves for granted.

One of my favorite examples came from an event planner named Andrea who had a résumé loaded with the usual laundry list of responsibilities. However, telling people what you are responsible for is not storytelling. There is no magic in responsibilities. If you want your story to be special, you have to find and include a few unforgettable details.

Andrea had the details; but they were buried. After much probing, I finally got Andrea to admit that in eight years at the company she had never gone over budget and had never missed a deadline. That was the beginning of a good story, but we need more. So I asked her to create a list of all the events she had planned along with key facts like:

• How many people attended each event

• How many people she supervised

• How much time she had to plan the event

• Her budget

• What she actually spent

• How much she saved

Of all the facts we uncovered, two were most surprising:

• The largest event she planned was for 20,000 people.

• She had saved her company a million dollars over eight years by coming in at or under budget on all of those events.

That turned out to be a great story because the average annual savings of $125,000 per year was $50,000 more than she was paid. In other words, she was an investment, not an expense.

Andrea’s story is particularly impressive when you consider how she originally discounted her performance saying, “I just did the job I was paid to do.”