A few weeks ago, Gregg Morris shared with me a Twitter recruiting video. The blogger who initially posted it, Michael Batistich, had called it a “great piece of storytelling… [that] makes me want to work there.”

Maybe I’m getting more discriminating about my definition of storytelling, but this video didn’t quite reach the level of storytelling for me. It’s more about symbols and metaphors. In the video, various functional teams use costumes and props to depict what they do. We can see that the Twitter employees all look young, diverse, and casual. They look like they’re having a good time. But I’d call this video “proto-storytelling,” rather than storytelling.

As Marguerite Granat said (I quoted here recently here), “It’s not the best employer that attracts the most candidates; it’s the one who knows how to tell a story through its employment brand.”

Twitter gets that. Even if the story is more of a proto-story.