Today is Job Action Day 2009, a day for job-seekers to take action steps right now — today — to move forward in their careers. The Quintessential Careers family of blogs (including this blog and Quintessential Careers Blog, Quintessential Resume and Cover Letter Tips Blog, and Career Doctor Blog), is looking at a promising aspect of the currently employment scene — turning unemployment into entrepreneurship.

For Job Action Day 2009, Quintessential Careers and a cadre of writers and bloggers are targeting several areas as offering bright spots of opportunity. In this entry, we look at stories of laid-off and displaced workers who are developing and marketing inventions:

Cheryl DelMastro
The economy forced my hand into making changes to survive financially.

I’m a Florida real-estate broker who owned a successful agency of 22 realtors strong. Once my agency all but closed due to the plunging housing market and loss of income, I chose to “reinvent” myself. Wanting to also set a good example for my three children, turning a negative into a positive was my mission in becoming a “mompreneur.” Within 18 months of sheer determination and hard work, my invention Stay with Me TM Baby Socks are currently in select Target stores nationwide. Mead Johnson will be test-marketing them this fall in hospital gift bags for new moms in the Northeast.

Always looking for the silver lining, I knew I could find a promising future in spite of the economic times in which we are living. So many people are now “reinventing” themselves as well. Whether going back to school or changing industries, we are reassessing our direction and purpose in our lives.

It’s all about taking the good out of a difficult situation and making a positive difference for you and your family.

Angela Larson
When let go from Wall Street in November 2008, I chose to chase a dream and start a toy company, Fierce Fun Toys. We now have our first product, Norman PhartEphant, on the market, a book, and two more prototypes in development.

Changing careers — shocking, but really a great move for my creativity, connection with my children, but still stressful financially, but I wouldn’t change a thing.

Trish Cooper
My story is one of entrepreneurship and the launch next month of my business venture resulting from the loss of my job.

This past January I lost my job after my company in which I was a CFO merged with another and moved out of state. When the day finally arrived, even knowing in advance I would no longer have my job, I was still somehow shocked, hurt, and my self esteem was at an all-time low. I had been sending out resumes without success and I was now out of work. All I could think was “I’m middle aged … what do I do now??”

After two days of my own “pity party”, I decided to take a deep breath while I figured it out and spend some of my new found free time with my beautiful grandbaby.

One activity that my granddaughter and I really took pleasure in was looking at family photos. As I was teaching my granddaughter about family members through photos and trying not to let smudge or crinkle the pictures, I was struck with an idea. I began to make interactive soft face photo-recognition flash cards for her that she could hold in her own little hands. The face photo-recognition game that we played is such fun and she was learning so much … when it struck me….

… Why not go for it and make a “real” game out of it? And that’s how the idea and my new business venture for my new interactive infant and toddler game Zatswho™ was born! Zatswho™ flash cards teach about family through face recognition, allowing you to share precious memories with little ones in a very hands-on and interactive way. They are designed to also help children learn about colors, basic shapes, and sequence. The flash cards, as well as the colorful tote they come in, are soft, easy to grasp wipe clean easily and are non-toxic.

After doing due diligence I determined it was worth the risk to go forward even if starting out I had to use my own personal funds. It’s been an exciting time for me and my family. I come from a close-knit family that loves getting together, sharing meals, going on outings, and just enjoying life and each other.

For me, watching my granddaughter’s face light up as she points out “Mommy,” “Daddy,” “Grand-poppy,” and other family members is an incredible thrill that never gets old! Zatswho™ flash cards have kept my granddaughter interested in more ways than I anticipated. Now that she’s grown into a toddler, she enjoys identifying different family members by name. She hugs and kisses the pictures, traces the shapes with her little fingers and is learning about matching as well. She carries her tote containing “her little treasures” wherever she goes!

The philosophy behind Zatswho™ is to fully embrace the core concept of love of one’s family including includes the need to know about family members, as well as the pursuit of wisdom by intellectual means through simple educational and developmental products. Our toys and games will be geared toward encouraging caregiver interaction with babies and toddler-aged children

I’m learning so much each day. Although I’m not a success story yet, I am a good example of not allowing the economic slowdown or my age to stop me from doing something out of my comfort zone and moving forward. I could never have imagined I’d be doing this. I have prepared a Business Plan to keep me focused.

I am to the point that I have begun to take orders. I’m having my website developed, getting ready to launch my new business venture next month in time for the holidays and then to the NYC Toy Fair in February, and I have just applied for an SBA micro-loan to help continue to fund my start-up.

If I mentioned to you a book titled Memory Mining, what would you think it was about? Improving your memory? Digging through your memory to construct your life story?

What if I told you the book’s subtitle: Digging for Gems from Your Past Good Work? For what purpose? Why should the reader dig for these gems?

Although, in my opinion, author Alan Hays has given his book an unfortunate title, he has developed a useful system for developing the kind of material that makes for effective stories in the job search. I suspect he titled the book Memory Mining because memory mining is what he calls his system. Unfortunately, I don’t think that title does anything toward explaining what this book is about and why its topic is important.

As Hays notes, hiring decision-makers “want to hear stories that point to a specific and relative outcome or accomplishment, experience, or even a failure they can measure against their perceived needs.”

I well know from my years in the career field, especially my stint as a resume writer, that most people don’t track their accomplishments well and have difficulty dredging them up from memory when they need to update their resumes.

Hayes advises a detailed process of analyzing the job description for any position the job-seeker is considering apply to, and then, through the Memory Mining Question Set, the job-seeker cultivates fodder for accomplishment stories that are specifically targeted to the opening. I have all the confidence in the world that this process is quite effective. My experience, however, tells me that many job-seekers are unwilling to put in the solid work it takes to go through this process.

Hays also prescribes a skills-based process for jogging the job-seeker’s memory. The job-seeker lists and prioritizes skills and then writes accomplishments stories for the top eight skills.

I hope job-seekers don’t miss out — because of a nondescript title — on a small gem that could boost their job searches significantly.

As if in response to yesterday’s entry in which Nick Corcodilos asked, “So, does your resume tell a story?” Certified Resume Strategist Karen Siwak writes about Career Storytelling: How Sharing Fascinating Experiences Gets YOU Hired!. “Ask any recruiter about a memorable candidate,” Siwak writes, “and chances are that it will be some element of [his or her] story that stands out.”

Siwak compares career storytelling to the third day of canoe tripping when “all pretenses are gone, and each of us has been revealed for who we are, in all our glorious colour and complexity” and everyone becomes comfortable relating storied experiences. I’ll take her word for it given that I’ve never been canoe tripping.

These stories, Siwak says, “are character building. They cause us to confront our foibles and take ownership of our strengths.”

They create the emotional space for self examination and questioning. Why am I here? Where am I going? Who do I want to be with? What do I want next?

Siwak doesn’t tell how to create a storied resume but asserts that she knows how to do it:

My goal as a Resume Strategist is to fast-track this process of self discovery, and I love it. I love getting people to open up about themselves and reach a place of personal authenticity from which truly unique and distinctive career stories can emerge. I love asking the probing questions that create “aha” moments. I love working with my clients to find exactly the right words to tell their stories. Any good marketing professional will tell you that stories sell. … Resume strategy isn’t just laying out a reverse chronology of your career path. It’s about telling a clear, succinct story about who you are and why you are the perfect solution to some company’s problem. It stirs interest and invites connection. It creates the opening for an interview, and lays the groundwork for you to be able to expand on your talents, strengths and insights.

I’ve encountered many resume writers who say they write resumes that tell a story, but I’ve never yet seen a resume that made me say, “YES! That’s a storied resume!” And that includes my own attempts. I still don’t know what the storied resume is, but I feel as though I will know it when I see it.

In the meantime, it’s great to hear another voice join the chorus for storytelling in resumes.

I’ve always been a big fan of Nick Corcodilos of Ask the Headhunter for his iconoclastic opinions and exposes of the dark underbelly of the hiring and job-search arenas.

Now I have even more reason to be a fan; Nick has just published on Fast Company, Toss Your Resume in the Trash and Tell Employers Your Story (thanks to my friend Thomas Clifford for turning me onto this piece). His premise leads to this question and conclusion: “How do you craft a resume that tells a compelling story? Don’t. … Few resumes leave the reader wanting to know more. … Toss your resume in the trash.”

Here’s how he arrives at that conclusion:

After 30 years of reading resumes, I know I’m going to find just one or two nuggets of useful information in any resume. I don’t care about the rest. I know a resume is so over-edited that it’s just a faint representation of the person it’s about. That’s why so few resumes yield interviews.

On the other hand, I love talking with prospective job candidates to find out what their stories are. Few have one to tell, and that makes it easy to move on to the next without hesitation or guilt. The one who has a story–well, now we’re getting somewhere.

A person with a story to tell knows the importance of having a beginning, a middle, and an end. (Can you say, “project management?”) The best of them know it’s also important to have a plot, a conflict, and a resolution. The rare resume has a distinct theme that reveals itself; I don’t have to try to figure it out. That’s the person with insight and motivation. That’s the person whose aspirations I care about. People with credible aspirations will work hard to deliver what a manager needs so they can get what they need.

Nicks says the storied interviews on Fast Company provide superb examples of the kind of stories candidates should be telling but he’s not clear about what communications medium a job-seeker should use to tell this kind of story.

He then confuses the issue. After telling us to trash our resumes, he asks:
“So, does your resume tell a story? Notice I said, ‘Tell a story,’ not ‘Hope the manager can piece together a story from all the facts.'”

So how do you write a resume that tells a story? Tomorrow’s entry offers a bit of insight from a resume writer who does that for her clients.

Cindy Chastain (pictured) joins Whitney Quesenbery as a user-experience (UX) guru who draws upon storytelling.

In a lengthy essay in the October issue of Boxes and Arrows: The Design Behind Design, Chastain writes about how a storytelling method can help unify teams and create better products.

I encounter very few items about storytelling that don’t get my brain clicking about how they might be applied to the job search. Chastain’s piece inspired me to think about framing user-experience stories as “employer-experience stories.”

Chastain talks about ccommunicating a “shared sense of the kind of experience” designers are trying to create when they develop products.

What if we thought of the job-seeker as the product (as well as the product designer) trying to create a storied experience for a prospective employer?

Chastain says to ask these questions, which I’ve translated to apply to the job-seeker:

• What is the product or service about? What is the job-seeker’s brand or Unique Selling Proposition?
• What will it do for the customer? What will the candidate do for the employer?
• Where does it fit into their lives? Where does the job-seeker fit into the employer’s organization?
• In what ways might we create an emotional response the customer can walk away with? In what ways might we create an emotional response that will inspire the employer to hire the job-seeker?

Chastain then discusses components of the user-experience story. The first is the experience theme, which she says is often expressed as a value, an opposition (something as opposed to something else), or “simply a very strong gut feeling about what the story is ultimately about.”

In Chastain’s work, a document called an Experience Brief packages and outlines the “purpose of the theme, the attributes unpon which it was founded, and the strategy it informs.” An illustrative Experience Brief gives a better idea of the Experience Theme and how we might apply it to job-seekers:

“An Experience Theme seeks to express the value of the user experience most desireable to your patrons.” Here, we consider the value of the experience you, the job-seeker, can bring that would be most desirable to the employer. (And here, we must note that “experience” refers not to your past work experience but to the way the employer will experience you as a prospective employee.)

Paraphrasing Chastain here and adding the job-search terminology:
Experience Theme is the mission or purpose of the job-seeker expressed as an over-arching theme that identifies what the job-seeker is all about from the point of view of the prospective employer. It is where the job-seeker’s goals and the employer’s needs meet. So, the Experience Theme might be expressed as a sort of branding statement on Unique Selling Proposition that encapsulates what the job-seeker can bring to a particular employer.

The Experience Strategy talks about how to execute the Experience Theme. The job-seeker would examine how to carry the theme through all of his or her marketing communications with a given employer.

Chastain also discusses how the theme is helpful because it tells you what to leave out. She relates theme to story/screenwriting guru Robert McKee’s Controlling Idea, which “shapes the writer’s strategic choices.” Just as “a scene might be cut because it’s simply not relevant to the theme,” a job-seeker might cut something from his or her resume or arsenal of interview responses if it’s not relevant to the theme.

Overall, this approach, Chastain says, creates a holistic design. Similarly, a job-seeker can create a storied, holistic design to how he or she creates the employer’s experience of him or her as a prospective employee.

I have written about several story structures that job-seekers can deploy — especially in job interviews — but also in resumes, cover letters, and other job-search communications.

Let’s review:

• Traditional Situation (or Problem or Challenge) > Action > Result (SAR, PAR< CAR) structure
• Steve Denning’s Attention > Desire > Reasons structure
• Gerry Lantz’s What’s at Stake? structure
• Lesley Morgan’s Feel … Felt … Found Blueprint
• Bill True’s Negative to Positive structure
• Rebecca Ruby’s Venn diagram
• Dick Gaither’s Who, What, Why, Where, When, How + Results structure

Every structure I’ve come across has been basically the same; it’s just that their originators use different words and nuances to describe them.

If they’re really all the same, why do I keep writing about them? Because not everyone can relate to the same structure. If you’re a job-seeker having difficulty grasping how to tell stories in your job search, perhaps the classic Situation –> Action –> Result doesn’t do it for you, but one of the others will.

Here are two more that I recently encountered and have framed in terms of job-search accomplishment stories:

From Mary Morel on the Flying Solo blog, in turn taken from Ros Jay, author of How to Write Proposals and Reports that Get Results:

• Position: In what position or role did you find yourself in a past or current job?
• Problem: What issue or problem did you encounter?
• Possibilities: What options did you have for solving the problems? What avenues did you consider?
• Proposal: Which option did you choose to solve the problem?

This structure leaves out perhaps the most important element, your results; be sure to tell prospective employers the outcome or results you obtained.

From a very nice essay by Bill Johnson, Perceiving the Foundation of Storytelling:

• Dramatic issue of consequence to the audience: What situation or problem did you handle in a past or current job that is directly relevant — or of consequence — to the job you’re targeting?
• The story’s movement: How did you move toward dealing with the problem and handling the obstacles along the way?
• Fulfillment: What resolution did you achieve? (Tell this story in a way that your audience, the prospective employer, will experience fulfillment because he or she will picture you solving the same kind of problem for his or her organization.)