In Talent Communities, Recruiters Can Learn More of a Candidate’s Story

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I’ve been saying for a while now that the fact that recruiters are increasingly using social media to find candidates indicates that they hunger to know more about candidates’ stories.

Recruiting expert Kevin Wheeler just provided more evidence. In a blog entry from earlier this week on ERE.net, he compares the databases recruiters keep of prospective candidates to talent communities (I’ve also heard the term “talent hub,” which I assume is the same thing.)

Databases, Wheeler writes, have been built up through “impersonal methods” — employer career websites, applicant tracking systems, and referrals.

Databases, he says, provide minimal information, mostly from resumes and profiles. “There is no additional information, no personal observations,” Wheeler laments.

He says most recruiters don’t even use their databases but instead turn to searching the Internet for candidates. Wheeler didn’t say recruiters search social-media sites, but we know that they do.

Now, I wish Wheeler had explained a bit more about what talent communities/hubs look like and given examples, but here’s the reason he gives for their being better than databases:

What makes the talent community I am talking about different is its ability to take advantage of technology to achieve levels of personalization that could not be achieved without it. … Candidates actually perceive talent communities as very personal. … Candidates can add more information about themselves, and recruiters can ask questions about specific skills or interests. … Recruiters may have never met a person face to face and yet know much more about them than if they have had two or three personal interviews.

In other words, candidates can reveal more of themselves, tell their stories, the way they do on social-media sites.

Indeed, in the glimpse Wheeler gives into talent communities, he talks about creating communities from Facebook pages, LinkedIn, Google groups, and Ning.

Although I have been in search of the storytelling resume (along with Terrence Gargiulo), I may be missing the social and community element that some recruiters are gravitating to.

Wheeler says the biggest obstacle to the widespread adoption of talent communities is resistance from recruiters.

I join Wheeler (and Terrence and others) in support of more personalized — and more storied — ways for recruiters and candidates to connect.

Q&A with a Story Guru: Katie Snapp, Part 5

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See a photo of Katie, her bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

Q&A with Katie Snapp, Question 4:

Q: Boiling down your approach to its simplest terms sounds like “change your story, change your life.” However, you seem to possess unusually solid knowledge of the neuroscience behind such an approach. Can you talk about how neuroscience enters into your story and leadership work?

A: I love science. At some level we think of “behavior” as being something intangible and therefore more difficult to manage. But not so true if you have some fundamental concept of the science behind our brains and our conscious minds. Our neuronal networks are built over repetition. Firing them enforces hardwiring them. So those deeply entrenched beliefs or repetitive thought patterns that we just mentioned that are drilled into us are changeable, whether adopted early in childhood or just a part of what we believe work or leadership should be like.

These beliefs (and the same thing goes for habits) are pathways in our
brains that are easily accessed because they are strongly wired. We used them a lot so they became hardwired. BUT … that does not mean we cannot unwire them. True. Through conscious behavior change, we can avoid using those old networks and can start building the ones we want.

The journey begins with recognizing your patterns and habits, owning them, reassessing them, and then changing those that we want to let go. Try telling your story in the future. Where do you want to be? Who do you want to become? What do you want to extend that you are successful at now? Then focus on that desires outcome — the future story — and you will be setting the new paths in your brain to make them happen.

It is a little more complicated than that, but our minds have a way of
making reality of whatever we focus on. You are reinventing your story!

Duarte Champions Storytelling in Presentations

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Nancy Duarte is a big proponent of storytelling in presentations, and she has just launched a series of short video tips on her blog to “answer some of the most commonly asked questions on storytelling, design, and presentation technologies.” Here’s her piece on storytelling in presentations, with a timely twist related to the current economy. Interesting points about conflict and vulnerability, too:

Q&A with a Story Guru: Katie Snapp, Part 4

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See a photo of Katie, her bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, Part 2, and Part 3.

Q&A with Katie Snapp, Question 4:

Q: You wrote to me when accepting my Q&A invitation: “With a credential that I earned last year, I now integrate my leadership training experience into coaching individuals to understand their belief systems and how those beliefs (both empowering as well as limiting ones) write their story. Corollary topics to the life story include: your career story, your money story, your wellness story, your relationship story). All those have the same premise about how we see the world through our story filter.” First, can you talk a bit more about the credential you earned, and secondly, can you discuss the advantages of “see[ing] the world through our story filter”?

A: My Life Story credential is through a terrific program called Live a New Life Story by Dr. David Krueger at Mentorpath. His vast experience as an executive coach and author has led to powerful material about recognizing your personal themes and patterns. I realized this had potent application to leaders in the workplace and developing ourselves as more effective leaders through self-discovery. Thus, my adaptation to leaders!

Much of our personal story is derived from the “messages” we received while growing up. These become the filters for interpreting the world around us. Of course that can be a terrific tool for engaging us with what we are good at. For example, if your message was “always try your best,” you are more likely to see challenges as something to focus intently on and push through until you know you put all your effort into it.

Consider also the message that we sometimes get in a tough-love family of “don’t screw up.” Surely, mom’s and dad’s intent was something about becoming a high performer, but in our developing years we may have heard it as “you are close to being a failure.” Imagine! Now, our radar is honed in on any misstep and a fear of failure may hinder our efforts.

In adulthood, we can thwart many of those beliefs simply through conscious awareness. The problem though … many of those beliefs may be subconscious to us. Time to become introspective.

Q&A with a Story Guru: Katie Snapp, Part 3

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See a photo of Katie, her bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, and Part 2.

Q&A with Katie Snapp, Question 3:

Q: What’s your favorite story about a transformation that came about through a story or storytelling act?

A: It’s a small one, but a great example. Gregory Maguire is a prolific author of children’s stories, and other stories, including Wicked, which went on to become the well-known Broadway musical. After roughly 23 publications, he observed that every one of the central characters he wrote about was missing a parent or had a dead mother. Odd pattern, and not recognized for years. Recently, though, Maguire noticed it and explained how his mother had died during childbirth. After all, if the mother is there, what’s the problem? How could there possibly be a story? This recurring theme is now a part of his newly aware belief system.

Q&A with a Story Guru: Katie Snapp, Part 2

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Q&A with Katie Snapp, Question 2:

See a photo of Katie, her bio, and Part 1 of this Q&A.

Q: What future aspirations do you personally have for your own story work? What would you like to do in the story world that you haven’t yet done?

A: I just started a Leadership Blog that includes Bad Leadership Stories. This blog is professional, reviewed and edited, so my aspirations for it are BIG and different from many blog mechanisms out there. I want people to have a venue to share in a controlled, professional manner.

Because I am a trainer and a problem-solver at heart, I hope that these blogged stories that come out will lead to ideas for anyone in need. I will develop web pages to address the issues the get exposed in the “Bad” stories.

(I would love additions to the blog. See http://www.better-leadership.com/Leadership-blog.html to share a story, or read one.)

Q&A with a Story Guru: Katie Snapp, Part 1

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I was attracted to the practice of Katie Snapp. Her focus is leadership, and she asks leaders what their leadership story is. She also holds a certification in New Life Story Coaches™ Training, which intrigues me. It’s a pleasure to bring you this Q&A with Katie, which will appear over the next five days:

Bio: Katie K. Snapp comes from a corporate business environment and technical production, where the daily grind was less than inspiring, until she found
the hidden secrets in transforming work into creative prospecting. After leaving the engineering world 21 years ago, she became a Leadership Performance Coach and a nationwide speaker. She thrives in interacting with groups and training teams to be more productive while having fun.

Katie’s first book Skirt Strategies: 249 Success Tips for Women in
Leadership has just been published and is a collection of inspiring ideas
and practical tips for women in leadership.

Katie is also the founder of Better-Leadership.com, an online resource for what she refers to as the “Everyday Leader.” This ever-growing website serves as a worldwide outreach to educate leaders in not only the basics of leadership, but how to realize fuller potential.

Q&A with Katie Snapp:

Q: The storytelling movement seems to be growing explosively. Why now?’ What is it about this moment in human history and culture that makes storytelling so resonant with so many people right now?

A: It is definitely growing, but it really has always been there to a large degree. Storytelling has been around since the beginning of time and was critical because it was the primary medium for passing along culture, history, lore, lessons learned. I believe we are simply re-labeling it and deploying it just a little differently.

Now that we have such powerful communications tools, it is still as important, but more massive that we can digest. So, we find those areas that we can relate to. We find the channels (blogs, websites, newsletters) where there are people to which we can personally relate. The stories have always been there, but now we have vast media to broadcast them.

Corporate storytelling is new on the scene though, at least in title. Take anything you might have previously labeled as “rumor” or “bad customer experience” and refine it a little. It makes a GREAT story when told with the key elements of storytelling — which include plot, people, problem, place, emotion, and hopefully the eventual solution.

Another Free Whitepaper on Business Storytelling

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I recently came across yet another example of the generous world of storytelling.

Paul Furiga and John Durante of WordWrite Communications are offering a whitepaper, Tales Worth Telling: How the ageless power of stories delivers business success, which they introduce like this:

In the 21st century, the traditional cookie cutter approach to communication is dead. In a world inundated by competing information and messages, the audiences you want to reach are hungry for meaning, yet they struggle to find it. You can provide meaning by telling your story, if you tap the ageless power of storytelling.

I don’t know the authors, who employ a method called StoryCrafting, but they provide an interesting paper. They offer these critical characteristics of persuasive business communications rolled into a storytelling paradigm:

1. The story must have context and be told by fluent storytellers.

What the messenger says about a product, service or business must have depth and provide a coherent whole to enhance audience understanding. Those presenting the story must be fluent storytellers who acknowledge the power of clarifying to communications effectiveness and have great command of their topic.

2. The story must be authentic — rooted in a business’ competitive facts and its core business purpose.

Authenticity in telling business stories is everything because it:

A. Builds audience trust, which

B. Determines how receptive an audience is to the story content, which is

C. Largely determinant of communication success.

3. Measures of story effectiveness must be frequent and appropriately used.

For hard-core organizational-story practitioners and enthusiasts, much of the paper may read like preaching to the choir. But newbies and veterans should glean good insights from it.

I look forward to learning more about Furiga, Durante, and WordWrite Communications.

Are You Sharing Your Story on This Day that Celebrates Life-Story Sharing?

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Today is the 2nd International Day for Sharing Life Stories.

The site that operates this day explains:

This day is an opportunity to celebrate and promote life stories, as a way to encourage critical thinking, cultural democratization, and social transformation. The International Day is organized by The Museum of the Person International Network (Brazil, Portugal, USA and Canada) and the Center for Digital Storytelling (USA, Canada, Denmark, Czech Republic, Ireland and Portugal)

The chosen theme for this year’s day is “Journey for Justice — Migration and Refugees.”

My offerings for this day don’t fit the theme and may not be lofty enough to “encourage critical thinking, cultural democratization, and social transformation,” but here they are anyway:

  • A fitting item for a day that celebrates life stories is an article in The Atlantic that I first learned about on the blog Mind Hacks. The article, entitled “What Makes Us Happy?” and written by Joshua Wolf Shenk is introduced thusly:

    Is there a formula–some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation–for a good life? For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. Here, for the first time, a journalist gains access to the archive of one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history. Its contents, as much literature as science, offer profound insight into the human condition–and into the brilliant, complex mind of the study’s longtime director, George Vaillant.

    “Vaughan” on Mind Hacks had this to say about the article:

    It weaves the staccato train of numerical data with reflections and insights from the men themselves to attempt the impossible — it hopes to record lives.

    From their brash early adulthood to their deaths or dotage the stories are brief but profound, sometimes tragic, sometimes joyful, sometimes mundane.

    The study itself has generated some remarkable findings, such as the massive impact of relationships, the fading long-term effects of childhood experiences, or the role of defences in managing emotional well-being, but the piece is as much about the life of the project as its conclusions.

    I have to admit I haven’t yet had a chance to read the article, but it was again called to my attention by LivelyWords (Albert E. Martinez) on Twitter, who noted that the piece “focuses largely on storytelling.”

  • Cathie Dodd, who participated in a Q&A on A Storied Career, has started a Facebook group called Everybody Has a Story — What’s Yours?, particularly noteworthy for its nice list of the kinds of life stories that folks can tell.
  • An article on the AARP site offers tips to Make Your Family Stories Come to Life.
  • My own paltry contribution to this day is the beginning of a site that tells the story of my first year of being “bicoastal” with my husband Randall. If you follow this blog, you know that we bought property last year in Kettle Falls, WA, with plans to live here in the summer and in our Florida home in the winter. We set out on our RV journey here on April 24 (spending a week in San Antonio for a conference) and arrived eight days ago. This journey has been remarkable for me, for us, in part because of the indescribable beauty of this little corner of Eastern Washington. Being here is truly life-changing. Today we plan to renew our wedding vows after 25 years of marriage. We’ll have no officiant; we crafted the ceremony and vows ourselves; and our church will be the Cathedral of Nature here on our breathtaking land.The site needs to do much more to tell and share the story of this momentous turning point in our lives.

    But it’s a start.

Q&A with a Story Guru: Casey Hibbard, Part 5

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See a photo of Casey, her bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

Q: The culture is abuzz about Web 2.0 and social media. To what extent do you participate in social media (such as through LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Second Life, blogs, etc.)? To what extent and in what ways do you feel these venues are storytelling media?

A: I do participate in social media (blogging, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and online communities specific to my field). However, I’m still exploring how story fits into this new development.

They all have the potential to be storytelling media but in different ways. Some formats are more suited to telling a complete story in a single serving, such as blogging and YouTube. Others are more about building a story about yourself, your business or your brand in bite-size pieces, such as on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

What’s fascinating is that they’re all interactive. Stories are not just told, but people can immediately comment and add to the understanding, or share their own similar stories. In my realm of marketing communications, this is unprecedented access and communication between an organization and its audiences. It’s part of a greater movement of authenticity and bringing down barriers. They’re letting go of control of every single word, and the result is impressive. Many companies are also now creating their own online communities that foster relationships and storytelling between their customers.

I think organizations have to find ways of weaving story into social media without sounding too contrived. A company can share a story on its blog or link to a YouTube video from Facebook, but ideally their customers are the ones freely sharing the stories and links in social media venues. The most compelling stories will be ReTweeted and shared again on any of a number of other sites like Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc. That’s when the real momentum starts to happen.