Like many people, I had one of my first introductions into the world of job-hunting through Richard Bolles’ perennial bestseller, What Color is Your Parachute? My earliest memory of this influential book is when I was participating in a job club in Knoxville, TN, in the 1970s.
Something I read recently on the Web reminded me that Bolles advocates storytelling in the job search. In the 2008 edition of the annually updated book, he even relates storytelling to blogging.
The exercise he recommends is called Seven Stories. He acknowledges resistance on the part of job-seekers to writing stories, and says he believed job-hunters didn’t like to write until blogging came along. The ubiquitousness of blogging convinced Bolles that we are a writing people, so he now advises folks to think of the Seven Stories as offline blog entries.
Bolles says each story should include:
- Your goal: what you wanted to accomplish.
- Some kind of hurdle, obstacle, or constraint that you faced.
- A description of what you did, step by step.
- A description of the outcome or result.
- Any measurable or quantifiable statement of that outcome that you can think of.
Bolles then asks job-seekers to analyze their stories for the transferable skills used in the story. At the end of the Seven Stories exercise, Bolles recommends deciding which skills are your favorites and prioritize them.