Rebecca Ruby wrote recently about the importance to nonprofit organizations of differentiating themselves, finding their “only-ness” (I think uniqueness is a better term). As often happens, I couldn’t help adapting Ruby’s formula for job-seekers (sorry it’s a little blurry; it didn’t reduce as well as I would have liked):

Then (in a Venn diagram she credits to Jim Collins of BBMG), Ruby says, think about how these three circles intersect. I’ve again adapted the diagram for the job-seeker:

Experience Corps, an award-winning national program, engages people over 55 in meeting their communities’ greatest challenges. Today, in 21 cities across the country, 2,000 Experience Corps members tutor and mentor elementary school students, help teachers in the classroom, and lead after-school enrichment activities. Independent research shows that Experience Corps boosts student academic performance, helps schools and youth-serving organizations become more successful, and enhances the well-being of the older adults in the process.

The Experience Corps site provides the opportunity for Experience Corps members, educators, and families to share their stories about the program. Here’s a sample:

I had a child in my class who had very low self confidence. He listened when he heard me say, “Now you’re cooking,” to children who were doing very well. When the other children heard this they paid more attention to how they did their work. When we test on math and reading and grade their paper they will say to me “Ms. G, am I cooking?” It just warms my heart to know that a little word such as cooking is making a difference in our children’s education Now this child is cooking, too!

Willy Franzen blogs about entry-level jobs at One Day, One Job in a folksy, story-like way, often providing access to the employer’s own story, such as through video. From the blog’s About page:

Every day we take a look at one employer and the jobs that they are offering for recent college graduates. We scour both online and offline media for information on jobs that you may never think to look for. Too much job seeker attention goes to the top handful of companies that hire at the entry level. We want to open your eyes to the thousands of opportunities available to you, one day at a time.

Malcolm Gladwell’s next book apparently will be about the challenge of hiring in the modern world. Amazon lists his next book as Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don’t, which doesn’t sound exactly like the topic he talked about at the recent New Yorker Stories from the Near Future Conference. Kotke.org reports that the topic is “the future of the workplace with subtopics of education and genius,” which sounds a bit more like what Gladwell talked about at the New Yorker conference. In any case, the book comes out in November, as Gladwell affirms in the video.

You can see and hear his story-rich New Yorker presentation here or download the conference free from iTunes.

He uses sports-recruiting analogies to illustrate what he calls “the mismatch problem,” the use of poor, non-predictive, hard, outdated, simplistic, objective criteria and tests to supposedly hire the right people. Only subjective on-the-job evaluation of performance actually works — largely because the demands of the workplace have so dramatically changed. We want certainty in hiring, so we uses these objective measures — but they don’t work, Gladwell asserts.

My friend Steve Rothberg of CollegeRecruiter.com calls this the “best recruiting video.” He says: “After watching this video, the only candidates who aren’t more likely to want to work for Whirlpool are those without souls.”

What he doesn’t say is why.

Because it tells a story.

Marci Alboher, who authors the Shifting Careers blog for the New York Times has been running a series in which she "glean[s] useful career skills from attending more arts and cultural events."

Giving a shout-out to A Storied Career as evidence that it's "well established that being a good storyteller is a useful skill in careers," Alboher attended a "Talking Stick" show and discusses "techniques they use to tell good stories."

Check them out here.

I learned yesterday that my book, Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling That Propels Careers, will be published by JIST Publishing.

The book was the non-scholarly companion to my doctoral dissertation, so I am thrilled to have it accepted for publication. A common goal of academics is to have their dissertation research published. I’ve had marginal success in publishing the scholarly portion, so it’s very satisfying to publish the non-scholarly.

I’m also gratified because the entire impetus for starting A Storied Career was my interest in the value of storytelling as the way to advance one’s career (in A Storied Career, I’ve obviously branched out to many other kinds of applied storytelling). Although other authors and even scholars have written small pieces about this connection, I’m the only one I know about who has made it a centerpiece of research.

A sister site of A Storied Career, Quintessential Careers, has published Tell Me About Yourself as a quasi-ebook under its Quintessential Careers Press imprint, and I have also been serializing the book in A Storied Career’s blog-within-in-a-blog, also titled Tell Me About Yourself. (I’m up to Chapter 7 out of 10 in the serialization). Both these versions are free. Since I don’t know whether JIST will feel kindly to having free versions out there in cyberspace, interested readers may want to take that opportunity now.

The Thank God It’s Monday newsletter from HumaNext/Communication Ideas suggests an exercise in which you ask yourself: What is the job you’d do for free? Asking that question, the newsletter says, is the path to discovering one’s life’s work, calling — or “genius,” providing the inquirer with these benefits:

• You gain a stronger, more affirming sense of personal identity.
• You acquire a positive perception of yourself at a deeper, more meaningful level.
• Discovering your genius suddenly brings your life to a sharp focus.
• It infuses you with the power of purpose and makes it OK to do what you do.
• It clarifies for you the reason for the direction you’ve chosen for your life and work.
• You develop increased confidence in yourself and in what you do.
• You acquire the language to communicate the value you can add to the opportunities you pursue.

I suggest taking “the job you’d do for free” a step further and write a story about it. Write about what makes it so fulfilling that you’d do it for free.

HumanNext says discovering your genius is “a long process, or a journey, with many pleasures along the way, culminating in a thrilling moment of discovery in which your genius finally comes to focus.” The newsletter says it can’t be done with a single exercise. What follows is another suggested exercise. Again, I suggest adapting this one in story format as you’ll see below:

Exercise: Discovering Your Genius From Your Past Successes

1. List many successes you’ve achieved in your life. These should be successes that provided you with great joy and elation, and in which things just seemed to flow naturally.
2. HumaNext suggests creating a list of action verbs describing the various actions you took to achieve success in each case. My suggestion is to instead write a story — probably in the format of Situation — Action — Result, or Problem — Action — Result, or Challenge — Action — Result.
3. HumaNext suggests identifying the few (one to three) common verbs that are repeated more often in the list above. My adaptation would be to identify common themes and patterns in your stories. Like the action verbs, these themes and patterns “are your starting clues to the basic drives that move and motivate you. They reveal the action-traits that come to you most naturally and bring you the most joy as they lead you toward achieving success.”

From Dick Gaither, the Wizard of Work, an expert in work search training and trainer of job-search trainers, comes a set of questions for identifying accomplishments stories to use in job interviews (and resumes and cover letters for that matter).

One of the most important questions any job applicant has to answer during the interview is the behavioral question “Can you describe your most notable professional or work-related achievement(s)?”

This question poses a couple of problems for many job-seekers. First, too many interviewees are uncomfortable talking about their achievements and feel like they’re “bragging.” A fact isn’t bragging! If you’ve had a hand in any type of work-related accomplishment or achievement, it’s not bragging … it’s a fact … once you can support it!

Our second problem is that too many employees overlook their small accomplishments and think the interviewer is only looking for big achievements. Don’t think an achievement has to be humongous to get an employer’s attention (Saved the company $10 million). Most of us haven’t been in a position to generate anything close to an earth-shattering, multi-million dollar achievement. But, we’ve all had the opportunity to have a hand creating any number of small, work-related accomplishments and achievements, such as: improving safety, doing the job quicker, saving money, improving customer service, etc. But just telling the interviewer you had an achievement isn’t enough. The interviewer wants a complete story. This seven-step questioning process I use with job seekers has proven to be a big help getting people to comfortably talk their achievements in the interview:

1. Describe an achievement
2. What was your role in the achievement?
3. What problems were you trying to solve?
4. How did your involvement benefit the company?
5. How did your involvement benefit your co-workers?
6. How did your involvement benefit customers?
7. What three key skills did you use in achieving this success?

Visit The Mistake Bank

Such a serendipitous chain of events … a story, if you will …

On Monday, I blogged about reconnecting with the Ning social networking group, Worldwide Story Work.

While I was reconnecting, I posted a blog entry to Worldwide Story Work about an upcoming project in which I am conducting Q&As with gurus of the storytelling world (I am officially announcing the project here on A Storied Career this month).

John Caddell wrote to me about the blog posting. Though he claimed not to be a guru, he was interested in doing a Q&A. The idea with the Q&As is to ask some general questions but also a couple of questions tailored specifically to the interviewee. To compose specific questions, I usually start with a book or Web site written by the interviewee.

John Caddell’s e-mail said his site was called The Mistake Bank. Intrigued, I visited The Mistake Bank, which is also a Ning social networking group and “a place to share stories of mistakes people have made in their lives and careers.”

What an awesome idea! Here are career stories we can really learn from. Lord knows, I’ve made plenty of mistakes in my career. Caddell writes:

The Mistake Bank idea came out of trying to create a story library of mistakes that people could consult when they underwent some change - say, a large investment, a new company, a new job, etc. And where people who were retiring could leave a bit of a legacy. Now that it’s in place and starting to grow, I’m finding, not surprisingly, that there are all sorts of interesting side benefits as well.

If I may preview a piece of one of John’s responses to the Q&A (which will appear in early October), he describes one of those side benefits:

As far as side benefits, when someone (especially someone prominent) admits to a mistake, it has this neat result of making him/her human to the rest of us. “Hey, she may be a world-renowned organizational-behavior expert, but she messes up just like the rest of us.” I think that’s beneficial to the workplace, and to society.