“If you had only 37 days to live would you feel happy with the story you have lived so far? How would you express that story, learn fro it, leave it for others?” Patti Digh raises those questions in her blog, 37days and uses it as the premise for 37days … Continue reading
Author Archives: KatHansen
More about the Importance of the Employer’s Story
I’ve talked in this entry and this one about how employers are increasingly telling the story of what it’s like to work in their organizations. Video is frequently the medium deployed.
Recruiting guru Dr. John Sullivan recently talked about The Power of Stories for Employment Branding and Referrals, asserting that:
No recruiting ad, brochure, website, or recruiter pitch can have the same power and effectiveness as current employees telling powerful stories about what it’s like to work at their firms.
Observing that “employees need access to powerful stories about the firm in order to use them in attracting potential referral candidates,” but that “most companies have no book or central depository that contains a list of all the firm’s stories about their people and management practices,” Sullivan recommends making stories available “through a corporate or business unit ‘story inventory.'” He suggests a formalized process for gathering and distributing stories. Without that, he says, “you are limiting your ability to recruit and brand by letting 75 percent of your stories remain in limited distribution.”
Many of his 17 Steps to Make Your Branding Stories As Powerful as Possible (see extended entry) could also be flipped around and applied as personal branding stories for job-seekers.
The Horizon Project: A Better World Through Storytelling
The Horizon Project is the International Storytelling Center‘s five-year capital campaign to build a better life, a better world, through the power of storytelling. Many folks in the current organizational storytelling movement will tell you they first got turned on to the power of storytelling at the National Storytelling Festival … Continue reading
What’s It Like to Be in That Career?
In a similar vein to CareerTours, which offers videos depicting the story of what it’s like to work for various companies, CareerHero hopes to inspire young adults to dream big by recruiting leading companies and executives to share insights about various careers through interviews, interactive chat, and Day in the … Continue reading
What’s It Like to Work There? The Video Stories
As I noted in Quintessential Careers’ 2008 Job-hunting on the Internet Annual Report, the millennials’ thirst for media is fueling efforts among employers to, for example, put up on their Web sites video of what it’s like to work at their organizations. Companies like Goldman Sachs offer videos of what … Continue reading
The Monday Morning Job Story
Does your career story – or current job story – include a dread of Mondays? Monster.com has depicted this sad but common theme in a commercial that itself tells a story:
Wedgie Stories!
“Scrubs” star Sarah Chalke is starring in a new ad campaign for Hanes about conquering the dreaded wedgie with No Ride Up Panties. The campaign was inspired by Chalke’s wedgie mishap on the red carpet at her first Emmys. Visitors to the Wedgie Free web site are invited to read … Continue reading
The Story Matrix
Craig Wortmann is the author of What’s Your Story?, which describes the “powerful impact stories have on the three most common performance challenges—leadership, strategic selling, and motivation.” Wortmann writes: While the technique of telling stories is the oldest form of communication, it’s also the one form that rises above the … Continue reading
Career Story, Indexed
Jessica Hagy creates these cool graphic representations of various aspects of life in her blog Indexed. Download A Career Path in Pictures.
Storytelling in Procurement
“Cousin” Jon Hansen recently wrote to me to tell me that he frequently tells stories when he speaks about procurement. Stories also appear in his Procurement Insights blog, such as these entries: The Bands of Public Sector Supplier Engagement Cluster Development and the CAC (PWGSC): Facilitator or Competitor? NPM’s guiding … Continue reading