As a refreshing change from the periodic articles that declare “the resume is dead,” Rachel Emma Silverman’s No More Résumés, Say Some Firms merely notes that some employers are turning to methods other than resume screening to initially evaluate candidates.
These methods include LinkedIn profiles, a job-seeker’s Web presence, and 
videos. Each of these venues is an opportunity to tell a story.
I should note that Silverman’s article doesn’t mention story or storytelling. She does however, quote employers saying things like:
- A résumé doesn’t provide much depth about a candidate.
- We are most interested in what people are like, what they are like to work with, how they think.
- A résumé isn’t the best way to determine whether a potential employee will be a good social fit for the company.
- If we had just looked at their résumés … we wouldn’t have hired them.
Those observations suggest that candidates have an excellent opportunity to project their personalities and help employers get to know them better by telling their stories.
I’ve written about the storytelling potential in many of the methods Silverman discusses.
- Many experts are suggesting LinkedIn profiles be less resume-like and more story like, as I wrote about recently.
- It’s tricky to tell a cohesive story about yourself across your entire Web presence, but a good beginning may be a social-media resume or a transmedia effort.
- I don’t believe video storytelling will ever become mainstream for hiring — because it’s time-consuming and problematic for record-keeping — but from what I’ve seen when companies do seek videos, those that tell stories are far more compelling and engaging than those that don’t. Here’s a case in point.
Even the methods cites that would not seem to provide storytelling opportunities might be. For example, one company asks candidates to complete a questionnaire. A questions like one of the samples Silverman lists, “What’s the best job you ever had?”, begs for a story.