Bob McIntosh (pictured) is a Career Trainer with “a tenacious appetite for learning and staying abreast of the latest job-search trends, and disseminating that knowledge to jobseekers of all levels.” He shares an interest in storytelling in the job search. He was kind enough to submit this parable.

A risk not taken is an opportunity lost

Many people with fishing poles are standing around a vast body of water with their fishing lines cast in it. They believe the water is abundant with fish, and, in fact there are some fish. They’re content standing there exchanging a word or two, speaking of hope and opportunity. They feel like old friends who are in it together.

Before a cave stands one man looking into it, and from within the cave eyes stare at him. The eyes are frightening, for they could be the eyes of monsters; but on the other hand they could be the eyes of friendly people. The man’s just not sure which. So he waits. The people are comfortable standing around that body of water with fishing line dangling from their poles. There’s comfort in numbers. The weather is fine — fine as in comfortably cool, not sticky hot. Life is grand.

Because the man in front of the cave is afraid of dark spaces, he won’t enter it even if someone were to beat him with a stick. It’s better to wait, he thinks.

Eventually the people grow tired of standing around the body of water with nothing happening. Hours have passed, morning turned into afternoon into early evening….They get hungry and their arms get tired from holding their light fishing poles. They start lowering their poles, grumbling from hunger. Life isn’t so grand.

The man standing before the cave doesn’t feel particularly courageous and stands before it wondering if it’s worth entering. It’s damn cold out and whatever’s inside the cave seem to be comfortable. Whoever’s in there continue to look out, almost taunting him. It’s as if they know something he doesn’t, and this begins to bug him.

Risks are hard to measure and the outcomes are not certain. Because they’re hard to measure, safety (as in numbers) and a common belief (there has to be plenty of fish in the water) seem to be more viable. This is exactly why the man is having a hard time entering that cave; it’s risky. Unbeknownst to him, he is a risk taker, an explorer. At the moment he’s unsure of what to do.

The people at the body of water, who are now beginning to drop their fishing poles and swear about being hungry, aren’t risk takers. And look what it’s getting them. They’re getting no fish. Further, they’re beginning to think that even if there are fish in the water, there are too many people with whom to share the fish.

Eventually the man standing at the entrance of the cave decides that entering the unknown is better than standing there and getting nothing accomplished. He takes a breath and puts one step forward, backs up, takes another breath, again puts the foot forward, then puts the other foot forward, until he’s in the cave. And guess what, it doesn’t seem that dark when his eyes adjust.

What he sees around him is opportunity that was hidden from him until he took the risk of entering the cave — only it wasn’t really a risk, as it turns out. He only has one regret; he wishes he’d entered the cave a lot sooner.

Meanwhile the people round the body of water have left, each believing that there are fish in the water. The fish weren’t biting today, but tomorrow will be a new day with hope renewed. They’ll discover much later that the promise of fish was an empty one.

Learn more about the hidden job market.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

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.

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Recently, in a LinkedIn group to which I belong, a member cited his “favorite LinkedIn profile of all time.” The profile belongs to Orrin “Checkmate” Hudson, who uses chess to turn around troubled kids, and it does the best job I’ve ever seen of using a LinkedIn profile as a platform to tell a story. And not just a story, but a compelling, inspiring story. Here is most of it:

I grew up in a tough housing project in Birmingham, AL, in the 1980s, never far from gangs, drugs, and criminal activity. Fortunately for me, I met an exceptional teacher who put me on the right path.

After 6 years as an Alabama State Trooper, I thought I’d seen some worst possible examples of human behavior. Then one night in May, 2004, the TV showed how 2 teenagers murdered 5 teenaged employees of a Wendy’s in far-away Queens, NY. Kids killing kids for money — cold blooded, execution style, no value for life — all for a lousy $2400.

Evil prevails when good people do nothing. The TV images were so awful I couldn’t sleep that night. I thought back to my own youth — growing up in a family of 13 kids — and how close I came to landing in jail for stealing inner tubes off truck tires. But an English teacher got me interested in the game of chess. He turned me around.

Watching the aftermath of a mass murder in Queens was my personal wake-up call. I decided to follow the example of my own teacher and use chess to turn around troubled kids. Nine months later I sold my business — auto sales and repairs — and launched BeSomeone.org. As of 2012, we’ve helped build the character of about 25,000 young people — our goal is one million — to inspire them through the game of chess.

The last time I wrote about LinkedIn profiles, I noted that one of the difficulties of deploying stories in profiles is that, like resumes, the profiles are usually constructed in reverse-chronological order. Granted, it appears that Hudson doesn’t seek a job; his objective seems to be to raise awareness for his organization and drive visitors to its Web site. As such, he perhaps has more latitude with the chronology of his profile.

LinkedIn profiles are usually presented in reverse-chronological order because the user wants the audience to see the most recent — and usually most relevant — career activity first. In promoting his organization, Hudson has less of a need to list the most recent first. In fact, his story does not follow a linear course. His profile is far more engaging for drawing the reader in with the challenge of his growing-up years. He then skips way ahead to a more recent career incarnation and how a classic inciting incident became the turning point that led to launching his organization.

In between the incident and describing founding the organization, he flashes back to the teacher that turned him around as a youth by sparking his interest in chess.

Skipped in the tale is how he went from being an Alabama State Trooper to owning an auto sales and repair business — but it hardly matters because the reader is so immersed in his tale.

Would a chronological — but not necessarily linear — story work in a job-seeker’s LinkedIn profile? Maybe. It helps to have a dramatic, turning-point inciting incident around which to spin the story. It also helps to write as well as Hudson does. At the very least, Hudson’s profile has opened my eyes to the story possibilities in LinkedIn profiles.

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While researching questions for an upcoming Q&A, I came across the Professional Values & Story Index (PVSI) on the site of The Storybranding Group, headed by Cindy Atlee, who has committed to a Q&A.

The assessment is based on a model created by Dr. Carol S. Pearson, who specializes in story archetypes. The site describes the index as a “story typing instrument for individuals that illuminates professional assets, values, and gifts through a story-based lens.”

Unlike the assessments in my 5-part series on Life-Story Interventions that Guide Career Choice, the PVSI doesn’t use storied techniques to arrive at self-actualization or help users come up with a preferred career/life story. Instead, it looks at story type, resulting in one of 12 story types.

I wasn’t surprised at my results; I’m a Creator. In every assessment I’ve ever taken — and I’ve taken many — the consistent themes are creativity, introversion, and intuition.

The other types are Caregiver, Ruler, Hero, Revolutionary, Magician, Jester, Everyperson, Lover, Innocent, Explorer, and Sage. Under each type are several sub-types; for example, under Creator are Innovator, Inventor, Artisan, Builder, and Dreamer.

Perhaps most valuable, pun intended, is seeing the values that go with one’s type, in my case, imagination, expression, invention, innovation, and authenticity.

I wasn’t in love with the interface of the assessment. As you can see in the image above, the assessment uses a standard Likert scale, but one with 10 choices. Having to determine where I fit on a scale of 1-10 for all the items in the assessment made my brain hurt. I would have preferred a scale of 1-5. Users should also note that results are not saved. I went back, thinking I might have missed something in the results, but was not able to access them.

Something I really like about The Storybranding Group’s offering of the PVSI is that it’s free. Says the site: “we decided to make this instrument available at no charge because it’s such an important part of our mission to make the world a better place through authentic expression. The only ‘consideration’ involved is that by taking the instrument, you’re agreeing to join our mailing list (which will never be sold to or shared with anyone else).”

Check out the PVSI here.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

I’m on a roll with storied techniques for reviewing and reflecting on accomplishments and such at year’s end. The latest is a re-discovery of an old friend, John Caddell.

John created The Mistake Bank, a place for folks to tell stories about their mistakes and what they’d learned from them. He disbanded the site, a Ning site, when Ning started charging a fee for its sites.

Now he incorporates mistakes — but also assessments, gripes, and accomplishments — in a 5-minute journaling technique. He even created an app for this endeavor. In 5-minute journaling really helps at year-end review time:

This year, I have been writing a short journal entry at the end of every workday — a short paragraph explaining the most notable event of the day. I then answer a few questions about the entry. One question asks me to categorize the event, which could be a mistake, an assessment, a gripe… or an accomplishment. I built this as a cloud-based app (ugly, but functional), so I could enter the data from anywhere, including my phone.

The app enables him to filter his entries by topic:

I simply added a filter for “accomplishment” and got a fairly long list of accomplishments for the year. They easily clustered into a few most significant ones. I used this information as the basis to write my self-evaluation. There were patterns, too, in the accomplishments, that helped me do the document my strengths. The items labeled “mistakes” were useful to find development areas — an important and challenging part of a self-evaluation. Given that I had the journal entries, providing concrete examples was easy. I’m confident my self-eval will be the best representation possible of what I did all year.

“Providing concrete examples,” of course, translates into crafting stories.

John was so pleased with this technique that he declares,”I won’t do an evaluation ever again without having the online journal to work with.”

And, bonus, he’s offering to share his cloud-based app if you email him at inquiry (at) caddellinsightgroup.com.

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As we reflect on 2011 and set goals for 2012, using techniques such as the Milestones and Memorable Moments exercise I shared last week, here’s another interesting tool.

Peter Schwartz’s Your Future in 5 Easy Steps: Wired Guide to Personal Scenario Planning actually appeared back in 2009, but I came across it only recently. In its use of quadrants, personal scenario planning reminds me a lot of SWOT Analysis. Both are tools that are not overtly storied but offer strong story elements. Schwartz writes:

To be clear: Scenario planning is not prediction. The goal is to envision possible futures, which will serve as guideposts to the path forward. The payoff is a clearer view of what the future may hold and of the most advantageous route through it.

It’s the possible futures where storytelling especially enters the picture.

The process in a nutshell is:

Identify forces likely to bear on the problem, organize them into future possibilities, envision paths that would lead to those futures, and devise a strategy for surviving them all. With a sharp picture of potential futures and corresponding plans of action, you’ll always be one step ahead.

Schwartz organizes the five steps into infographics using a sample situation — the future of a career in aerospace engineering. The technique is geared to career but could conceivably be used for more personal aspects of life.

Briefly, the steps are:

1. Listing driving forces — variables, trends, and events that will affect your mission, dividing them into certainties and uncertainties, and ranking them in order of significance.
2. Make a quadrant grid (matrix) in which the two most important uncertainties — from the top of your list — form the axes of a grid, with each quadrant representing a potential future.
3. Here’s the storied part: “Make the scenarios more concrete by fleshing them out into imaginary, but plausible, news stories that are emblematic of the forces at play.”
4. “Develop strategies for coping with the four futures you’ve imagined.”
5. Armed with what you’ve come up with, be aware and sensitive to the way the future is unfolding. “Adjust your action strategy to anticipate the future as it emerges.”

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

My colleague Darrell Gurney has conducted an annual process for more than eight years in which he “powerfully wrap[s] up the passing year before going on to design my coming year.”

He offers his exercise to subscribers and friends at the end of each year.

While the end of the year is typically time for goal-setting for the next year, Darrell believes the process needs another component:

At this time in December, everyone gets on the bandwagon of designing goals for the coming year. But I believe that taking on more challenges without acknowledging and appreciating from whence we have come lacks the HUGE spark of energy that we can get from that kind of self-inventory.

You can get Darrell’s MILESTONES & MEMORABLE MOMENTS worksheet by submitting your first name and email address.

I recommend you take the exercise a step further and, wherever possible, craft your responses to the prompts in story form. Doing so will help you remember them better and help you express them in your professional life — say, in job interviews or meetings with your boss in which you make a pitch for a raise or promotion.

The prompts cover such areas as accomplishments, motivations, obstacles, surprises, mistakes, disappointments, and more.

Darrell’s even offering a four-part series of tele-calls to guide folks through the Milestones and Memorable Moments and goal-setting process over four Wednesdays:

4 Consecutive Wednesdays
Dec. 21 through Jan. 11
5-6pm PST
Dial-in: 218-936-7999
Access Code: 840504#

If you’d prefer not to give your name and email to get the worksheet, you can access a Web version here.

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Harry Urschel recently published a blog post that serves as a good reminder that not all aspects of your career experience are ripe for storytelling in job interviews.

One of the cardinal rules of cardinal rules of job search is not to trash a former employer. As Urschel points out, “job search coaches will consistently tell you to never bash or criticize previous employers. It almost never results in a good outcome for you. Yet… it’s one of the most common mistakes people make in job interviews.” See this recent post for an illustration of an employer-trashing that I believe is a mistake.

The temptation to bash and trash a previous boss can come up in a number of ways in an interview, for example in response to questions like these:

• “Why did you leave your last job?”
• “Have you ever had difficulty with a supervisor?” This one has always seemed to me designed to test the interviewee — to see if he or she will fall into the trap of disparaging the ex-boss.

Interviewees may also be inclined to criticize a former boss when asked behavioral questions with a negative edge to them. Urschel gives a sample dangerous answer to a question that must have been something like, “Tell me about a project that failed and what you did about it:”

“objectives and milestones weren’t well defined for me”

These negativity-tinged behavioral questions are common; interviewers want to know how you’ve overcome bad situations. See examples of such questions among the samples here, starting at Question 25.

One reason negative stories about former bosses is a bad idea is that the interviewer will assume you will also trash your boss if you get the job you’re interviewing for.

Urschel points to another reason:

Whether you like it or not, or think it’s fair or not, an interviewer generally will naturally take your employers side in the stories you relate. Anyone who has been in a supervisory or managerial role for any length of time, comes to realize that there are always two sides to every story. And while they certainly realize that an employee may have legitimate complaints, the tendency is to wonder what the other side of the story might be.

Urschel prescribes a positive spin to the way you begin stories that relate to former employers:

“The project failed because I didn’t make sure I had objectives and milestones clearly defined for me. It was a great lesson to learn and a mistake I certainly won’t let happen again.”

“My manager and I had differing views on how to deal with customers, and I didn’t creatively come up with a resolution that would satisfy us both. The experience has taught me how to be more solution oriented.”

Bottom line is to put yourself in the interviewer’s shoes and consider how your ex-employer stories sound to your prospective employer.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

From time to time, I’ve scrutinized the story quality of slideshows, especially resumes in slideshow form; the most recent was last month’s exploration of a “Présumé™” (presentation resume) that was nicely crafted but not really storied.

Since then, I’ve come across a couple of more storied examples. While the above Présumé™ probably has the most sophisticated design of recent examples, these two tell more of a story:

The less successful of the two, The Story of Cory has a very sophisticated design. But Cory’s goals and audience are unclear as he tells the story of his career. He concludes that he is really an entrepreneur, so the resume would not seem to be aimed at getting a job. (Toward the end, the content suggests the slideshow is a promo and recruiting tool for SlideShare itself.) He also violates a number of job-search “rules:” He trashes a former employer, as in the slide above. He talks about all the schools he dropped out of. He spends a little too much time on his leisure activities. He tells his story in third-person, which makes it less personal than if it were in first-person. It’s a beautifully done presentation; I’m just not sure what Cory’s message is. At least it is authentic.

More successful — in fact, arguably the best slideshow resume I’ve seen — is that of Heidi Lilly. The foregoing link (also embedded below) is to the SlideRocket of her slideshow resume, which is specifically targeted to one employer and which has more bells and whistles than the more generic SlideShare version.

Heidi most definitely tells her career story — in a much more positive way than Cory does. She integrates lots of multimedia goodies into the presentation, especially the SlideRocket version — maps, music, animated type and graphics, photos, infographics, a Wordle graphic, a Venn diagram, and a feedback form.

She tells what her story means to the employer in terms of skills and personal qualities, even noting that she uses Excel to “read stories” and PowerPoint to tell them. She conveys passion. In the SlideRocket version, she offers ideas for the targeted employer.

I’d hire her in a heartbeat.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

 

Job-seekers probably don’t think about the sheer numbers of people that hiring decision-makers talk to during the recruiting and hiring process — and how candidates need to stand out from the pack to be remembered.

An interesting — if slightly flawed — article by Esther Choy describes the kind of numbers corporate recruiter Steve Song encounters as he meets with MBA grads:

Song, for example, recruits for his bank and frequently travels to Kellogg to do coffee chats and interview candidates. Each time he speaks with 15-25 interested students within a four-hour period. At the end of his daylong recruiting trip, he returns to his New York office at around 9 p.m. to continue his regular day of work. Scott typically meets 100-200 people at corporate-sponsored social functions at each school, interviews 12 candidates per day, and eventually only invites 25% of the candidates for in-house interviews.

Without explicitly suggesting to readers that candidates should tell stories to the decision-makers who are talking with multitudes of would-be hires, Choy notes that stories are much more memorable than data. She cites a stat from “cognitive psychologist, Jerome Bruno” — I’m pretty sure she means Jerome Bruner — “that information is 20 times more likely to be remembered if it is shared in the context of narratives, or, stories.”

She then offers six bullet points on how to tell your story. The first is “Go at least five layers deeper than your initial answer [to a typical interview question].” What does that mean exactly? How do you quantify the layers of an interview response?

She also notes that when asked a question such as “Why do you want to work in investment banking?” or “Why do you want to work for [a specific company]?”, candidates sometimes say it’s because they want to gain more client experience. In her “five layers” bullet point, she urges job-seekers to dig deeper in explaining why they want more client experience.

The flaw there is that saying you want to work in a certain field or for a certain company to gain more experience is a terrible response. It’s a me-first response that violates a cardinal rule of job-seeking: “Ask not what the employer can do; ask what you can do for the employer.”

And, like so very many writings that prescribe storytelling as a solution to business and career issues, Choy’s piece offers no examples of what a story told to a corporate recruiter might look like.

It’s still a valuable piece, though, for stressing how hard it is to be remembered amid the vast numbers of people recruiters deal with — and how story is a great way to beat the odds.

Choy is a practitioner with an agency that’s new to me, Leadership Story Lab, which I’d like to learn more about.

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Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.