Category Archives: Storytelling and Career

… when you tend to tell stories about it. So contends Don Cohen on BabsonKnowledge.org in writing about NASA’s use of storytelling for knowledge management at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the story overseer there, Theresa Bailey. Writes Cohen: … the benefits of telling a story can be profound. Shaping … Continue reading →

In his Build a Better Box blog, Steve Lovelace makes a point about marketing/advertising/promotion that easily applies to job-seekers: When a company says, “We provide an excellent product at a reasonable price with expert-level service”, they are talking about things that should almost go without saying. Would we buy from … Continue reading →

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.

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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 →

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 →

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:

Jessica Hagy creates these cool graphic representations of various aspects of life in her blog Indexed. Download A Career Path in Pictures.

Watch tomorrow as A Storied Career’s Blog-within-a-Blog, Tell Me About Yourself, launches and serializes my book, Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling that Propels Careers. Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling that Propels Careers, Quintessential Careers Press, ISBN-10: 1-934689-00-9. Find out the ways you can own the entire book

Here’s the book that resulted from my dissertation research. It will be available as a free e-book in the first half of 2008. Two preview chapters are available, one at this link, and the other as a PDF that you can request from me via e-mail: kathy@astoriedcareer.com. Starting in March, … Continue reading →

In a blog posting called Using Stories To Sell: What Makes A Good Anecdote? (free registration required), Ford Harding lists 10 guidelines for stories used to make sales. It’s not too big a leap to see how these apply to the stories you can tell when you are selling yourself. … Continue reading →