My colleague Barbara Safani (pictured) posted two terrific blog entries in the last month about storytelling for job-seekers. She and some other career colleagues recently attended a workshop put on by New York City’s Narativ, which apparently, in part, inspired these posts.
The first offers excellent guidelines for telling stories in response to job-interview questions:
- Personalization equals passion. A great story of success to showcase during an interview is one that proves your passion. To simply state that you are passionate about building strong sales teams or creating technology infrastructures would sound cliche. But communicating a story about a time that you put your blood, sweat, and tears into a project to get it done on time and on budget would be an authentic and more interesting way to tell your story and make hiring managers feel confident that you could create similar experiences in their organization.
- Everyone has a story. So many job seekers think they have nothing unique to say. “I just did my job; I didn’t do anything special” is one of the statements I hear most frequently from job seekers trying to prove the impact of their work. But like your family history, your work history is unique to you. Try to focus on how you did your job effectively and what you do differently than your colleagues or your predecessors in the position.
- The specifics of the story are more important than the general facts. I don’t remember all the facts or the time line of every grandparent story I heard this weekend. But for each story I heard, I remember several snippets that best describe that grandparent and even offer clues to their values and way of life. In interviews, most people think they should talk about their skills in general terms, but it is the specific examples of success and the specific metrics behind those stories that prove your impact that the interviewer will remember.
- A personal story can represent a universal feeling or experience. All the grandparent stories I heard were quite different. Yet there were common themes of family, community, love, and loss that everyone could relate to. When you interview, you are attempting to find common ground with the interviewer. You are trying to develop rapport by proving that the things you have achieved in your past positions will help improve their current work environment.
Barb’s more more recent post addresses the issue of how to tell difficult stories in a resume. She notes that job-seekers are often reluctant to tell these stories that have a negative taint to them. “I disagree,” Barb writes. “Job seekers can show their ability to influence positive outcomes, even when the deck is stacked against them and business conditions are exceptionally challenging.” She offers these examples:
- Secured sales meetings with 80% of target audience; successfully introduced products and services despite inherent obstacles including saturated and shrinking market.
Providing leadership in environments plagued with infighting…
- Successfully broke down business silos and improved information sharing across cross- functional teams by creating an open and transparent work environment to foster collaboration.
Salvaging a damaged client relationship…
- Reversed strained client relationship that was damaged due to a previous producer’s missed deadline by quickly mobilizing team resources to shave close to 75% off the normal project completion time.
Preparing for a failed company’s closing…
- Developed a liquidation strategy that maximized profit margin from inventory and kept vendors and staff engaged until final closing.
Managing poor performers…
- Reversed performance issues for a struggling employee who went on to become the division’s #1 account executive and ranked in the top-ten firm-wide.
The only thing I’d add to Barb’s resume stories is that in a resume, it’s often a good idea to tell the ending of your stories first because resumes are read so quickly. Employers like to see results, so it’s helpful to tell resume stories in this order:
Results –> Action that caused those results to occur –> Situation or challenge that necessitated the action.