A couple of recent articles by career practitioners have focused on storytelling.

My colleague Sharon Graham continues her excellent series on career storytelling with Advancing your career through effective storytelling (see others in the series here). Sharon focuses on developing your personal career branding story, a “central story [that is] is an introduction of yourself.” A highpoint of the post is her collection of suggested uses for the personal career branding story — professional events, a career transition when you want to tell people what you’re looking for and what you can bring to the job, leaving a voicemail for a hiring decision-maker, and answering an interview’s question, “Why should I hire you?”

When I wrote Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling to Get Jobs and Propel Your Career, the career-branding story was one of the concepts I struggled the most with. What’s the best way to develop a career-branding story, and what does it look like? I have my own ideas, which I wrote about in the book, but I’d like to see Sharon’s. As powerful as her post is, I’d love to see some examples.

Nevertheless, Sharon drives home a couple of crucial points about career storytelling:

• “If you want to captivate listeners, now is the time to begin organizing your career achievements and successes into stories.” I cannot emphasize this point enough. Careerists should constantly track accomplishments. My workbook accompanying Tell Me About Yourself offers beaucoups exercises on identifying accomplishments and composing stories about them.
• “You must also be prepared with multiple compelling stories that connect to your personal career brand. … The key to telling effective stories is preparation and practice.” I concur with the quantity + quality approach Sharon implies. Different job prospects require different stories. (Again, my workbook gives practice in adapting stories to various jobs/employers.) And preparing an arsenal of accomplishments-based stories is one of the best ways to boost a job search, especially the interviewing phase.

Which brings us to the second article — Peter Newfield’s take on a story formula for job interviews. Peter adds several elements to the standard Situation (or Problem or Challenge) —> Action —> Results formula (in both Tell Me About Yourself and the accompanying workbook, I list many variations on this structure.):

1. The strong opening. (Newfield describes the opening as a “teaser preview of the story’s big punchline,” recalling Annette Simmons’s smart technique of using a teaser to gauge how much story the interviewer wants to hear. Her sample teaser is: “”I prefer to lead in a collaborative manner. But if a group needs it I can be directive enough to go fast. Like the time my group’s budget was cut 30% and we had one day to decide how to deal with it.” Since it would be a rare interviewer who would not want to hear the details of that story, it would serve nicely as an opening teaser.)
2. Positioning.
3. Problem statement.
4. Failed solutions.
5. Your solution.
6. Objections.
7. The proof.

Newfield acknowledges that this seven-part story might take a while to tell, but says you can deliver it in three minutes. Unfortunately, I am convinced that three minutes is too long for an interview story. Two minutes should be the absolute max, and even that is pushing it.

I love this point, though:

Think you can tell a good story for an interviewer if you typed it out across two double-spaced pages in a Word doc first, to get the story down in this format (which also serves as a way to practice it in advance)?

I’ve done some research on how the act of composing (storied) interview responses in writing helps cement them in your brain and prepare you for interviews. Just be aware that you need more than one story. You can get by with fewer than you might think (as few as three), but up to 20 is even better.