Job-seekers probably don’t think about the sheer numbers of people that hiring decision-makers talk to during the recruiting and hiring process — and how candidates need to stand out from the pack to be remembered.
An interesting — if slightly flawed — article by Esther Choy describes the 
kind of numbers corporate recruiter Steve Song encounters as he meets with MBA grads:
Song, for example, recruits for his bank and frequently travels to Kellogg to do coffee chats and interview candidates. Each time he speaks with 15-25 interested students within a four-hour period. At the end of his daylong recruiting trip, he returns to his New York office at around 9 p.m. to continue his regular day of work. Scott typically meets 100-200 people at corporate-sponsored social functions at each school, interviews 12 candidates per day, and eventually only invites 25% of the candidates for in-house interviews.
Without explicitly suggesting to readers that candidates should tell stories to the decision-makers who are talking with multitudes of would-be hires, Choy notes that stories are much more memorable than data. She cites a stat from “cognitive psychologist, Jerome Bruno” — I’m pretty sure she means Jerome Bruner — “that information is 20 times more likely to be remembered if it is shared in the context of narratives, or, stories.”
She then offers six bullet points on how to tell your story. The first is “Go at least five layers deeper than your initial answer [to a typical interview question].” What does that mean exactly? How do you quantify the layers of an interview response?
She also notes that when asked a question such as “Why do you want to work in investment banking?” or “Why do you want to work for [a specific company]?”, candidates sometimes say it’s because they want to gain more client experience. In her “five layers” bullet point, she urges job-seekers to dig deeper in explaining why they want more client experience.
The flaw there is that saying you want to work in a certain field or for a certain company to gain more experience is a terrible response. It’s a me-first response that violates a cardinal rule of job-seeking: “Ask not what the employer can do; ask what you can do for the employer.”
And, like so very many writings that prescribe storytelling as a solution to business and career issues, Choy’s piece offers no examples of what a story told to a corporate recruiter might look like.
It’s still a valuable piece, though, for stressing how hard it is to be remembered amid the vast numbers of people recruiters deal with — and how story is a great way to beat the odds.
Choy is a practitioner with an agency that’s new to me, Leadership Story Lab, which I’d like to learn more about.