Just as some of my favorite gurus are predicting that storytelling will become the dominant theme in social media in the next year or so, more and more seems to be written about storytelling as an important theme in job search. I’ve been asked, for example, to assemble a storytelling track for a 2011 conference for career-management practitioners. More cases in point — these recent items:

Miriam Salpeter wrote that telling stories well is the most important thing a job-seeker can do. In turn, Miriam (who kindly cited my book, Tell Me About Yourself) pointed to her friend Ken Revenaugh, whose blog touches of ways to tell effective career stories in the storytelling category of his blog, Fast Track Tools.

Michael Margolis recently collaborated with Julien Gordon on a teleseminar called How To Tell Your Powerful Story about storytelling and how it relates to your personal and professional brand and growth.

The next two items are actually not so recent; they’re from last year, but somehow I never saw them until recently, even though I’m mentioned in both. My friend Steve Krizman wrote about storytelling in his What I look for in resumes and What I look for in cover letters. In the former, Steve tells what he learned about the applicant who included this mission/statement on her resume:

My mission is to be better than I was yesterday. My action is not to get through the day, but to gain from the day. My vision is to take the path less traveled and act on those opportunities others are not willing to see. My process will be to take risks and only ask others to do what I myself can and will do. My objective is to identify new challenges and learn from both success and failure. My focus is my family, my health and my professional development. My goal is to inspire positive change and champion every moment of life.

“Kathy Hansen,” Steve writes, “in her excellent new book Tell Me About Yourself, says I am constructing your story when I scan your resume. Indeed, I made a first draft of your story when I read your cover letter (see my post on what I look for in cover letters). Your resume fills in the blanks and fleshes out the story outline.” Actually, the idea of the hiring manager reading a resume with his or her “story mind” comes from Terrence Gargiulo in his 2002 book, Making Stories: A Practical Guide for Organizational Leaders and Human Resource Specialists.

In his follow-up article, Steve suggests that in cover letters, job-seekers should “tell stories, but be short and to the point. Think very hard about that list of traits and skill sets and come up with stories that illustrate them. Describe the situation, what you did, and how it all turned out. Like this:

I single-handedly coordinated a party in Montréal, Canada for the company’s affiliates. Challenges included selecting a venue without an in-person visit, communicating with restaurant owners in French and negotiating cost in another currency. (The company’s) president and managers told me it was the best party in company history