Cindy Chastain (pictured) joins Whitney Quesenbery as a user-experience (UX) guru who draws upon storytelling.

In a lengthy essay in the October issue of Boxes and Arrows: The Design Behind Design, Chastain writes about how a storytelling method can help unify teams and create better products.

I encounter very few items about storytelling that don’t get my brain clicking about how they might be applied to the job search. Chastain’s piece inspired me to think about framing user-experience stories as “employer-experience stories.”

Chastain talks about ccommunicating a “shared sense of the kind of experience” designers are trying to create when they develop products.

What if we thought of the job-seeker as the product (as well as the product designer) trying to create a storied experience for a prospective employer?

Chastain says to ask these questions, which I’ve translated to apply to the job-seeker:

• What is the product or service about? What is the job-seeker’s brand or Unique Selling Proposition?
• What will it do for the customer? What will the candidate do for the employer?
• Where does it fit into their lives? Where does the job-seeker fit into the employer’s organization?
• In what ways might we create an emotional response the customer can walk away with? In what ways might we create an emotional response that will inspire the employer to hire the job-seeker?

Chastain then discusses components of the user-experience story. The first is the experience theme, which she says is often expressed as a value, an opposition (something as opposed to something else), or “simply a very strong gut feeling about what the story is ultimately about.”

In Chastain’s work, a document called an Experience Brief packages and outlines the “purpose of the theme, the attributes unpon which it was founded, and the strategy it informs.” An illustrative Experience Brief gives a better idea of the Experience Theme and how we might apply it to job-seekers:

“An Experience Theme seeks to express the value of the user experience most desireable to your patrons.” Here, we consider the value of the experience you, the job-seeker, can bring that would be most desirable to the employer. (And here, we must note that “experience” refers not to your past work experience but to the way the employer will experience you as a prospective employee.)

Paraphrasing Chastain here and adding the job-search terminology: Experience Theme is the mission or purpose of the job-seeker expressed as an over-arching theme that identifies what the job-seeker is all about from the point of view of the prospective employer. It is where the job-seeker’s goals and the employer’s needs meet. So, the Experience Theme might be expressed as a sort of branding statement on Unique Selling Proposition that encapsulates what the job-seeker can bring to a particular employer.

The Experience Strategy talks about how to execute the Experience Theme. The job-seeker would examine how to carry the theme through all of his or her marketing communications with a given employer.

Chastain also discusses how the theme is helpful because it tells you what to leave out. She relates theme to story/screenwriting guru Robert McKee’s Controlling Idea, which “shapes the writer’s strategic choices.” Just as “a scene might be cut because it’s simply not relevant to the theme,” a job-seeker might cut something from his or her resume or arsenal of interview responses if it’s not relevant to the theme.

Overall, this approach, Chastain says, creates a holistic design. Similarly, a job-seeker can create a storied, holistic design to how he or she creates the employer’s experience of him or her as a prospective employee.