Moribund Resumes, Vivacious Stories

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It seems like at least monthly a career guru is predicting the death of resumes — or even pronouncing them already dead. The latest is Ryan Rancatore, who poses the question, “Will Resumes Be Extinct By 2020?”

These gurus rarely use the word “story” to describe what’s lacking in resumes or what will replace them, but their characterizations of what’s currently missing suggest that stories will fill the bill nicely.

Rancatore, for example, notes that resumes are “a woefully inadequate representation of a person’s life, career, and skill set.” Clearly, stories could better showcase those aspects. A commenter to Rancatore’s posting said, “Employers need better more concrete ways of seeing you as you really are and if you are worth their investment.” Another said: “People will want something much more personal than a piece of paper.” What better and more personal way than storytelling to enable an employer to see you as you really are?

Some of the communication vehicles that Rancatore and his commenters suggest will replace resumes — such as LinkedIn profiles, online portfolios, blogs, and VisualCVs — lend themselves better to storytelling than resumes do.

Still, Rancatore and his readers need to be careful what they wish for. Rancatore predicts that “by 2020 I suspect the average [social-media] ‘profile’ to include tons of video and interactivity.” Videos certainly are potentially story-rich, but does Rancatore have any idea how time-consuming it would be for hiring decision-makers to go through those tons of video and interactivity? Recalling my experience in reviewing just three videos submitted for Ink Foundry’s contest to choose a social-media intern based on 3-minute videos submitted by candidates, it took me more than 10 minutes to review these three videos. It would have taken no more than a couple of minutes to skim their resumes.

Yes, resumes will change, evolve, morph, and perhaps even die. Everything that hiring decision-makers say about what they want instead of resumes convinces me that they hunger for stories from candidates. The trick is to find a medium in which job-seekers can reveal their authentic selves in a storied way that hiring deciaion-makers can easily process.

Applying Storied Social-Media-Campaign Principles to the Job Search

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First: Internship Story Has Happy Ending

My recent involvement with Ink Foundry’s contest to choose a social-media intern based 3-minute videos submitted by candidates reinforced the value of story-rich social media in the job search. Readers might want to know how the contest came out. The candidate whom I felt created the video of highest (and most storied) quality, Lauren, got the fewest votes in the contest. Her competitor, Rachel, was clearly skilled at rallying votes and won in the voting. Rachel deserves a lot of credit for harnessing social media to win the contest. I learned yesterday that Ink Foundry hired both Rachel and Lauren. An outsider like me could conclude that the agency’s decision recognizes that in social media, quality content is just as important as the ability to reach great numbers of people.

Next: Two bloggers Offer Guidelines for Storied Social-Media Campaigns

A couple of bloggers have recently posted entries that also cite the importance of story-rich, quality content. Park Howell, who runs an eponymous green marketing agency, proposes a social-media-campaign “recipe” that is “7 parts strategy, 6 parts storytelling, and 4 parts tactical channels.” Job-seekers, in my opinion, can apply most of this recipe to deploying social media in the job search, Here’s my version of his recipe, adapted for individuals mounting a social-media campaign to bolster a job search:

I. Strategy for Job-Search Social Media

1. Describe your brand in one sentence

2. Communications goal

  • What are you trying to accomplish? [Probably something like: “Communicate my unique value to employers.”]

3. Where is your audience relative to what you have to offer as an employee?

    • Awareness: How familiar are they with you and your qualifications?
  • Interest: They’ve heard of you but have not interacted with you.
  • Action: They’ve taken at least one action because of your campaign — perhaps contacted you or invited you for an interview
  • Advocacy: Howell says advocates are fans of your brand and perhaps even evangelists. In the realm of job search, this level of awareness probably comes only when the audience/employer hires the job-seeker

4. How does your audience use social media?

  • Although Howell’s question is appropriate for job-seekers, his characterization of how audiences use social media (which comes from Forrester Research’s Technographic Ladder) is probably not quite on target. Audiences, Howell says, are Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, and Inactives. I would characterize the employer audience as Seekers when it comes to hiring; employers are routinely searching LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter as a low-cost way to find candidates.

5. What makes your story unique and shareable?

6. How will you become more approachable?

7. How will you know you have won? [presumably when you receive a job offer]

II. Telling Better Accomplishments Stories

Accomplishment stories are the meat and potatoes of getting an employer’s attention. Employer want to know that you can achieve the same results for them that you have attained for past employers. Howell’s story formula needs a bit of tweaking for accomplishments. Here’s my version:

1. Describe the hero (you, the job-seeker/protagonist)

2. Describe a situation, challenge, or problem you faced.

3. Who/what stood in your way (Antagonists, Obstacles)?

4. What did you have to overcome?

5. What was the result; what did you achieve?

Howell provides a library of resources to help you become a better storyteller.

III. Activating Your Career-Marketing Social Media Plan

1. Realistically, what do you have to do to activate your plan?

2. Who needs to buy in and champion your cause? [employers and network contacts who can refer you to employers]

3. How long will it take to launch?

4. What social media channels will you launch first? [such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, your own blog]

Meanwhile, Rick Braddy makes a strong case for using stories when launching anything to an audience. His examples of “anything” include products, companies, websites, or political candidates), so a launch can clearly apply to a job-seeker. “These stories,” Braddy writes, “answer important questions for the audience,” which I’ve again slightly tweaked to apply to a job-seeker launching himself or herself to an audience of employers:

  • Who is this candidate and where did he or she come from?
  • Why should my organization care?
  • What’s in it for my organization? What can this person contribute
  • Why should I listen to you, the candidate?
  • Why should I take action and actually interview you or consider hiring you?
  • Why should I act now instead of delaying or just doing nothing instead?

Continues Braddy:

Stories provide an interesting way to answer these (and other) questions people have about what’s being launched and how it could affect them. Stories can be conveyed in a variety of ways, including blogging, videos, newsletters, and emails.

These are all some great starting points for ensuring that both story-rich content and strategy for reaching audiences are optimal for the job search.

Post-Valentine’s Call for Connections through Story

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Still basking in that Valentine’s Day afterglow? Looking to start your workweek with a smile?

Enjoy Terrence Gargiuolo’s beautiful, brief video, Organizational Relationships.

Terrence kicks off by asking some thought-provoking questions about technology and whether it has brought us closer together or hindered relationships. He wonders whether we can fulfill our basic human need for connection within organizations, workplaces. One way we can, of course, is by sharing stories — carefully.

Some words and ideas from the video:

There may be no short cuts to forming relationships but the shortest distance between two people is a story.

Draw the stories of people around corporate imperatives and watch how people are drawn to each other and become more engaged performers.

Be vigilant in your story endeavors. The path to relationships is wrought with traps… We tend to see the stories we expect. Tell the stories we need. And only listen when we need to make sense.

By the way, Terrence offers some other nice videos on Vimeo.

Oh Boy! Part 2 of User-Experience Storytelling is Here!

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Francisco Inchauste’s eagerly anticipated Part 2 of his Better User Experience with Storytelling article kicks off with interviews with four practitioners in the field — Dorelle Rabinowitz, Curt Cloninger, Christian Saylor, and Cindy Chastain (You might want to read Inchauste’s comments illuminating my entry about Part 1 of his article.)

He asks each his or her approach to storytelling in user experience design, how they feel storytelling ties into business’s profit motive, and what resources each recommends for those who want to learn more about storytelling in user experience design. Among those resources — plus some tools that Inchauste recommends:

He also links to a slideshows by Rabinowitz and Chastain …

Some snippets of the expert interviews that resonated with me:

  • Rabinowitz: “I realized that storytelling facilitates communication, that people respond emotionally to stories, bond over stories and share stories again and again, and that the more I integrated storytelling into my work the better the work was.”
  • Cloninger: “… narrative design … means allowing the user to have some kind of personal say in completing her experience.”
  • Chastain: “Brand message is no longer the thing that sells. Experience sells. If the intangible pleasure, emotion or meaning we seek can be made tangible through the use of story and narrative techniques, we will build more compelling product experiences.”
  • Saylor: “I strongly believe that everything has a story associated with it. Every business, social group, concept, methodology and relationship is desperately seeking out better ways to engage with its audience. Some just happen to do it on a large scale (Apple), while others quietly create a pattern of life that goes unnoticed until it disappears (the remote control). From packaging that sits on the store shelf to the applications that follow us throughout our days, story influences just about every aspect of our lives. Story is all around us. It gives us a sense of understanding and knowledge of the people and things that are important to us.”

Later in the article, Inchauste offers examples of storytelling applications in several design realms: Packaging: Apple; Technology: Microsoft Courier; Marketing: Six Scents Perfume; Architecture: HBO Store; and Websites: Showtime Sports


[Illustration credit: I’m pretty sure Inchauste designed the “Good design tells a story” graphic.]

Tell Your Job-Search Story and Win a Bunch of Cereal

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Golden Grahams cereal is soliciting ridiculous job-search stories for a contest. Weekly drawings will eventually result in 75 winners getting a dozen boxes of Golden Grahams cereal each.

Given that entrants must tell their “stories” in even fewer characters (122) than they could on Twitter (140), I question the narrative quality. As Antoinette Coleman, marketing manager for Golden Grahams, explains in an interview on SmartBlog on Social Media, the 122-character limit is of course so entrants can tweet and share their stories virally. The funniest stories, however, will be animated and published on the site.

You can see at right the one that made me laugh out loud.

Another Option for Mastering Story Delivery: Acting Class

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Here’s the latest entry in my (unintentionally) ongoing series on how to learn and master a story so your oral delivery of it sounds natural.

Heather Summerhayes Cariou, author of the acclaimed memoir about her sister, Sixtyfive Roses, responded to the most recent entry in this series, writing:

As a former professional actor, I would suggest that storytellers find a local acting class and attend it. What they might learn there will help immensely in terms of oral storytelling — and even reading their work aloud.

Cariou noted that she’ll be teaching “Presenting and Promoting Your Work” this summer at the 33rd International Writing Guild Conference at Brown University, the first week of August and that the workshop will include instruction in how to read aloud.

Visual Storytelling, Learning Styles, and the Corporate Boardroom

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I learned two new things from a Worldwide Story Work teleconference this week presented by Malcolm Jones, an expert in ideation and sketching. Well, probably a lot more than two, but these were the ones that really stood out.

  1. An affinity for visual storytelling over text-based storytelling (or vice versa) probably reflects one’s learning style. Yes, that’s kind of a “duh” statement, and I’m sure I knew it on some level, but I hadn’t thought about it before Jones’s teleconference (even though Wednesday’s entry was about learning styles). I found it difficult to personally relate to Jones’s assertion that writing is very difficult for many people; yet, that observation is true to my experience. Writing comes incredibly easily to me, but I know from six-plus years of teaching business communication to college students that writing is agony for many. Some find linear storytelling to be a painful process, Jones says, and visual storytelling is less linear and more spatial than written storytelling. He also points out that the brain takes in visual stories differently than it takes in linear, written stories, yielding different insights. And an affinity for one over the other reflects differences in right- or left-brain dominance. Especially intriguing was Jones’s reminder that some 60 percent of people are visual learners. Given that stat, it’s almost surprising that visual storytelling isn’t more dominant over text-based storytelling.
  2. Like other kinds of storytelling, visual storytelling is now being used in business — in business comics, games and other forms of play, and a field that was completely new to me, graphic facilitation. Jones cited Kevin Cheng as a major name in using comics for User Experience Design and later shared with me links by and about Cheng: The Power of Comics: An Interview with Kevin Cheng, Communicating Concepts Through Comics from Cheng’s own blog, and Examples of Comics in Designing Customer Experiences. In graphic facilitation, Jones says, a graphic artist works with a facilitator to create a visual story of what goes on in a group meeting. A site describing an upcoming workshop on Graphic Facilitation also provides a good description: “Using graphics to lead group process in a highly engaging, interactive way. … Participants learn to draw, create large-format displays, record, and practice facilitating and receiving feedback. They also design a meeting process and learn about methods of documenting visual meetings” and Graphic Facilitation is all about “applying visual language to group processes.” (A couple of resources on Graphic Facilitation: The Center for Graphic Facilitation, Graphic Facilitation Focuses A Group’s Thoughts — and apparently the definitive book on the discipline is David Sibbet’s Graphic Facilitation: Transforming Groups with the Power of Visual Listening).
    Jones also noted that storytelling literally comes into play in business in the form of games and role-plays. He reported that corporate groups are building things out of LEGOs to solve business problems, using a process called LEGO Serious Play. Jones cited a book on business play, which seems to cover more than just LEGOs, Serious Play.

Jones talked a bit about comics and storyboarding and recommended three tools:

To that list, I would add ComicLife, the comic software app for Mac. I’ve never used ComicLife for an actual comic, but I use it lots of other graphics functions since I don’t have and don’t know how to use Photoshop. As Jones notes, these tools can help one tell a story with comics — but necessarily a good story.

Mary A. Hartt, What Was Your Story?

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Family history, a strong interest of mine, is a rich source for stories.

I don’t have to go far back in my family tree, for example, to uncover the story of my maternal great-grandfather’s mysterious disappearance or my great-grandmother’s many years in an insane asylum.

Yesterday, I polished my coin-silver tea set in preparation for packing it for our upcoming move (coin silver was the standard before sterling). My father handed down the tea set to me on his 70th birthday (he must have somehow known that he was near the end of his life because he died a few months later). My dad expressed his wish that I would pass the tea set down to my eldest child someday (I plan to do it on my 70th birthday). Before my father had the tea set, it had sat on the buffet of his parents’ dining room and had been passed down through the family via his mother’s lineage.


One piece in the set that tells of its origins is a chalice. Now, I can’t tell you why a chalice is part of a tea set. Inscribed on the chalice are the initials ECH and the following:
In memory of her sister, Mary A. Hartt
Died July 21, 1845
Aged 15 years, 7 months
(You can see a detail of the chalice inscription in the photo.)

So, the tea set came down to my grandmother through this Hartt clan. Just one problem … Extensive genealogical research has revealed no Hartts in our family tree. The story of the tea set is veiled in mystery:

  • How am I related to Mary A. Hartt?
  • If I’m not related to Mary A. Hartt, how did my family come into possession of the tea set?
  • Who was ECH? H was obviously Hartt. If we consider popular 19th-century names, we might conclude that E was for Elizabeth or Emily.
  • Was it customary in 1845 for people to be given tea sets or other keepsakes in memory of dead siblings?
  • What was the story of Mary A. Hartt and her brief 15 years of life? How did she die?
  • Why is a chalice part of a tea set?

I’ve conducted some research on Mary A. Hartt on Ancestry.com and have come up empty.

Given that stories are how we make sense of the world, it’s not surprising that my mind wants to spin stories in response to the tea set’s mysteries.

Technique for Mastering a Story Depends on Your Learning Style

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A few weeks ago, I presented the dilemma of blogger Jared (Moon Over Martinborough), who recently began podcasts and was concerned that his oral delivery didn’t sound sufficiently “campfire-story”-esque.

I tossed around a few thoughts on achieving a natural-sounding delivery, including suggesting Jared not even read from his written text (did I really say that?). Jared’s dilemma affects many of us who want to deliver spoken content in a way that sounds natural and conversational but don’t want our words to sound read or memorized. Some people can speak wonderfully off-the-cuff, but Lord knows, I’m not one of them. We often depend on written text to help us feel confident in our delivery and ensure we don’t forget what we want to say. Look at President Obama, whose legendary dependence on teleprompters is so extreme that he uses them in classrooms of schoolchildren.

Thankfully, a wiser voice than mine has suggested that there’s no one way to master a story or other content. Karen Dietz, in an article called The Trick To Learning A Story, relates mastering a story to learning style, noting that techniques that work for one person may not work for another. “[S]ome people need to write it down,” Dietz writes, “but there are plenty of others who can simply visualize the story and follow the chain of images to tell it. Some people just need to repeatedly listen to a story to learn it. So it really depends on your learning style as to which method will work for you.”

Here’s Dietz’s discussion of learning styles and the technique that aligns with her styles and works for her:

[W]hen building your storytelling skills, you also need to determine your best method for learning and remembering your stories so you can easily recall and tell them.

What learning style are you — Kinesthetic (I have to do it and get the physical feel of it) or Auditory (I have to listen to it) or Visual (I have to see it)?

Most people are a combination of the three with one or two that are dominant. For me my strongest learning styles are Kinesthetic and Visual. If I can see the images in my minds eye, and then feel the images physically, then I’m half-way home.

My best method for learning stories is to think about the story I want to tell and how I want to tell it. Then I get out my 3×5 index cards and create a BRIO (brief reminder of image order), a technique I learned from storyteller Doug Lipman [www.storydynamics.com]. On each card I write a keyword of the image, or draw a stick figure/diagram/picture of it. No artistic talent is required. These are just my own scribbles. This is my visual learning style.

Then I go on a walk and start telling the story out loud. This is where I get to see if the order I THINK the images should go actually work out that way; 99% of the time they DO NOT, and as I walk I reorder them.

What I love about this method is that by walking and practicing out loud, I kinesthetically build the story into my body. I find I can recall that story when I need to, and tell it in ways that I know will get results. Once I get to this point, I’m then ready to practice telling the story with a listening partner.

Terrific advice. Adapt your story mastery to your learning style. Mine are auditory and visual — decidedly not kinesthetic. For me, I believe auditory dominates, so I’d like to develop a mastery technique that suits that style.

And while I’m praising Karen Dietz, I should point out that she has revamped her Web site and is offering excellent, free story-related tools here.

Story Goodies You May Have Missed from the Twitterverse

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It’s been at least two months since I’ve looked at storytelling items that are getting significant buzz on Twitter — usually in the form of multiple retweets. The primary application I use to alert me to storytelling items on Twitter has been out of commission, and my alternate methods aren’t quite as user-friendly. So, the following isn’t a comprehensive compilation — nor is it totally up to date — but I present some highlights of the storytelling conversation on Twitter:

  • Rob Mills got tons of comments and retweets of his December blog entry, Storytelling on the Web, which suggests that storytelling has gotten lost in cyberspace.
  • Through Twitter I learned of a 50+-page downloadable PDF Literature Review by Patricia McGee, PhD., on using storytelling for teaching and learning.
  • My good friend Thomas Clifford had a popular blog entry in his Boosting Employee Engagement With Multimedia Storytelling, and interview with Jim Hauden, author of The Art of Engagement: Bridging the Gap Between People and Possibilities. Here’s what Hauden has to say about storytelling:

    A number of companies are starting to see the difference between using multi-media to “tell and sell” and using it to create insight and to model examples of success. One company calls their examples “proof points” of what behavior looks like when it is in concert with a new strategy. Multi-media can be a powerful way to answer one of the most profound questions that people rarely ask regarding strategy: “What does it look like?” As long as people are concerned that what they think it should look like might be different from what leaders are picturing, they’ll sit back and wait for others to go first. But if leaders can vividly create insight through multi-media in terms of what it looks like when strategy is being executed, we can start to close that gap. We begin to reduce the apprehension that people feel when it comes to taking the risk to bring new strategies to life.

  • Three Reasons Why Storytelling is the Key to Social Media Marketing Success by “Guarav” was a popular post that included these words:

    Given how central storytelling is to the human condition, it’s not a surprise that social media is most powerful when it is used for storytelling. These stories can be about the organization and its brands, but they are more powerful when they are stories about the role these brands play in the lives of their consumers. The most powerful stories are about what these brands stand for, if they stand for a larger social object: a lifestyle, a cause, or a passion.

    The resources at the end of the post are especially valuable.

  • And two quotes I liked from the last couple of months: @jshelley78 (who subsequently changed his Twitter account to @jamesshelley) said: “What ‘actually happened’ does not define us nearly as much as the story we choose to believe” and (I believe) from my friend @treypennington: “Look for strong linkages [among] #socialmedia, #knowldgemgmt & #storytelling to emerge in 2010.”