What characteristics comprise good stories used in the job search (in resumes, cover letters, portfolios, personal branding, interview responses, and, as discussed in yesterday’s entry, networking communications)?

Melinda Briana Epler, in a piece not long ago on Best Practices in Storytelling, provided a set of Storytelling Rules of Engagement that are well-suited to job-search stories. Here they are with my comments on how they apply to the job search:

1. Authenticity: The employer should see and understand the real you in your job-search stories
2. Transparency: Your stories must be honest and verifiable
3. Emotional Investment: The most effective job-search stories will inspire emotional investment from your audience — employers or members of your network
4. Personally Aligned Values: Your stories must illustrate how your values fit with those of the employer
5. Community Ownership: Although I’m not 100 percent sure what Epler means by this one, my interpretation for the job search is that your stories should make you seem as though you are already part of the employer community.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

As I learned from the Career Diva blog of Eva Tahmincioglu, Tom McAlister created a comic book strip, Brandman to the Rescue, with himself as the superhero, Brandman.

The comic, which you can see here, tells the story of McAlister’s career and accomplishments.

Hiring managers, Tahmincioglu explains, weren’t the main target of the comic. McAlister distributed it to members of his network “to reenergize the key people that could help him land a job — his network of friends and former colleagues.”

As Tahmincioglu writes:

Many of the employed individuals out there may be experiencing a bit of help-a-friend-who’s-out-of-work fatigue. That’s why I think it’s a brilliant idea to think of ways you can get your networking circle to get excited about recommending you. McAlister would give the comic strip to his contacts or to people he knew at companies he wanted to work for, and those contacts would be pumped about passing it along…much more pumped than they would have been just passing along a boring resume.

Eventually, McAlister created a print version that he distributed to contacts and folks he’d interviewed with. It was through that distribution that McAlister eventually landed a job — after the comic was passed along to a hiring manager by a former boss.

McAlister also has a bio and a resume on his Brandman site; the resume is available in both comic and traditional formats.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

I’ve explored the idea of the storytelling resume many, many times in this space, always on the lookout for what the ideal storied resume would look like. I still don’t know the exact form the perfect storytelling resume would take, but one place to start is with an existing resume.

Karen Siwak (pictured), about whom I wrote here (be sure to read her comments on the entry), has formulated a checklist to gauge the storytelling quality of a resume. In a guest blog post on HRMargo, Karen notes, “I am a fanatic about resumes that tell an interesting story, and frankly, most don’t. In fact so many resumes fail spectacularly when it comes to story telling, that having to screen through a stack of resumes has been likened to water torture.”

Here are the first few items on Karen’s 12-item checklist, the rest of which you can read in the guest post:

Here is my storytelling check list, and I can tell you that less than 10% of the resumes I’ve critiqued over the years have met even half of these criteria:

• Is there a target job title and a profile or summary that speaks to a specific target audience?
• Is the summary laden with warm and fuzzy “plays well with others” self-aggrandizements, or does it contain factual statements that show why this candidate is the perfect solution to a specific kind of challenge?
• Is there an easy-to-read “table of contents” outlining the candidate’s top 10 to 12 core skills and expertise?

The next step for the job-seeker would be seeing what perfect, storied execution of the dozen items on Karen’s checklist would look like on a storytelling resume.

[Thanks to Terrence Gargiulo for alerting me to Karen’s guest post.]

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Telling stories of your accomplishments is effective not just for the job search, but also when you are in your performance review and when you’re negotiating an initial salary or, later, a raise.

In the salary-negotiation portion of a job interview, be prepared “with stories to tell that illustrate your accomplishments and values,” writes Susan Adams on Forbes.com, citing the advice of Orville Pierson of the outplacement firm Lee Hecht Harrison.

My newest discovery among kindred spirits who link storytelling with career and job search is George Dutch, who writes in his blog:

A successful career transition or a job search requires some storytelling competence, not for its own sake, but for the sake of the listener, i.e., your next employer or client. A story does not exist in a vacuum. It is part of a social or cultural context.

The context Dutch refers to comprises the issues, challenges, problems, mission, and goals of your employer or prospective employer. Tune into those so you know the right stories to tell — those that illustrate how well you can address the context — or how well you have addressed it if you’re in a review or salary-negotiation.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

It seems like at least monthly a career guru is predicting the death of resumes — or even pronouncing them already dead. The latest is Ryan Rancatore, who poses the question, “Will Resumes Be Extinct By 2020?”

These gurus rarely use the word “story” to describe what’s lacking in resumes or what will replace them, but their characterizations of what’s currently missing suggest that stories will fill the bill nicely.

Rancatore, for example, notes that resumes are “a woefully inadequate representation of a person’s life, career, and skill set.” Clearly, stories could better showcase those aspects. A commenter to Rancatore’s posting said, “Employers need better more concrete ways of seeing you as you really are and if you are worth their investment.” Another said: “People will want something much more personal than a piece of paper.” What better and more personal way than storytelling to enable an employer to see you as you really are?

Some of the communication vehicles that Rancatore and his commenters suggest will replace resumes — such as LinkedIn profiles, online portfolios, blogs, and VisualCVs — lend themselves better to storytelling than resumes do.

Still, Rancatore and his readers need to be careful what they wish for. Rancatore predicts that “by 2020 I suspect the average [social-media] ‘profile’ to include tons of video and interactivity.” Videos certainly are potentially story-rich, but does Rancatore have any idea how time-consuming it would be for hiring decision-makers to go through those tons of video and interactivity? Recalling my experience in reviewing just three videos submitted for Ink Foundry’s contest to choose a social-media intern based on 3-minute videos submitted by candidates, it took me more than 10 minutes to review these three videos. It would have taken no more than a couple of minutes to skim their resumes.

Yes, resumes will change, evolve, morph, and perhaps even die. Everything that hiring decision-makers say about what they want instead of resumes convinces me that they hunger for stories from candidates. The trick is to find a medium in which job-seekers can reveal their authentic selves in a storied way that hiring deciaion-makers can easily process.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

First: Internship Story Has Happy Ending

My recent involvement with Ink Foundry’s contest to choose a social-media intern based 3-minute videos submitted by candidates reinforced the value of story-rich social media in the job search. Readers might want to know how the contest came out. The candidate whom I felt created the video of highest (and most storied) quality, Lauren, got the fewest votes in the contest. Her competitor, Rachel, was clearly skilled at rallying votes and won in the voting. Rachel deserves a lot of credit for harnessing social media to win the contest. I learned yesterday that Ink Foundry hired both Rachel and Lauren. An outsider like me could conclude that the agency’s decision recognizes that in social media, quality content is just as important as the ability to reach great numbers of people.

Next: Two bloggers Offer Guidelines for Storied Social-Media Campaigns

A couple of bloggers have recently posted entries that also cite the importance of story-rich, quality content. Park Howell, who runs an eponymous green marketing agency, proposes a social-media-campaign “recipe” that is “7 parts strategy, 6 parts storytelling, and 4 parts tactical channels.” Job-seekers, in my opinion, can apply most of this recipe to deploying social media in the job search, Here’s my version of his recipe, adapted for individuals mounting a social-media campaign to bolster a job search:

I. Strategy for Job-Search Social Media

1. Describe your brand in one sentence

2. Communications goal

• What are you trying to accomplish? [Probably something like: “Communicate my unique value to employers.”]

3. Where is your audience relative to what you have to offer as an employee?

• Awareness: How familiar are they with you and your qualifications?

Interest: They’ve heard of you but have not interacted with you.

Action: They’ve taken at least one action because of your campaign — perhaps contacted you or invited you for an interview

Advocacy: Howell says advocates are fans of your brand and perhaps even evangelists. In the realm of job search, this level of awareness probably comes only when the audience/employer hires the job-seeker

4. How does your audience use social media?

• Although Howell’s question is appropriate for job-seekers, his characterization of how audiences use social media (which comes from Forrester Research’s Technographic Ladder) is probably not quite on target. Audiences, Howell says, are Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, and Inactives. I would characterize the employer audience as Seekers when it comes to hiring; employers are routinely searching LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter as a low-cost way to find candidates.

5. What makes your story unique and shareable?

6. How will you become more approachable?

7. How will you know you have won? [presumably when you receive a job offer]

II. Telling Better Accomplishments Stories

Accomplishment stories are the meat and potatoes of getting an employer’s attention. Employer want to know that you can achieve the same results for them that you have attained for past employers. Howell’s story formula needs a bit of tweaking for accomplishments. Here’s my version:

1. Describe the hero (you, the job-seeker/protagonist)

2. Describe a situation, challenge, or problem you faced.

3. Who/what stood in your way (Antagonists, Obstacles)?

4. What did you have to overcome?

5. What was the result; what did you achieve?

Howell provides a library of resources to help you become a better storyteller.

III. Activating Your Career-Marketing Social Media Plan

1. Realistically, what do you have to do to activate your plan?

2. Who needs to buy in and champion your cause? [employers and network contacts who can refer you to employers]

3. How long will it take to launch?

4. What social media channels will you launch first? [such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, your own blog]

Meanwhile, Rick Braddy makes a strong case for using stories when launching anything to an audience. His examples of “anything” include products, companies, websites, or political candidates), so a launch can clearly apply to a job-seeker. “These stories,” Braddy writes, “answer important questions for the audience,” which I’ve again slightly tweaked to apply to a job-seeker launching himself or herself to an audience of employers:

• Who is this candidate and where did he or she come from?
• Why should my organization care?
• What’s in it for my organization? What can this person contribute
• Why should I listen to you, the candidate?
• Why should I take action and actually interview you or consider hiring you?
• Why should I act now instead of delaying or just doing nothing instead?

Continues Braddy:

Stories provide an interesting way to answer these (and other) questions people have about what’s being launched and how it could affect them. Stories can be conveyed in a variety of ways, including blogging, videos, newsletters, and emails.

These are all some great starting points for ensuring that both story-rich content and strategy for reaching audiences are optimal for the job search.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.

Golden Grahams cereal is soliciting ridiculous job-search stories for a contest. Weekly drawings will eventually result in 75 winners getting a dozen boxes of Golden Grahams cereal each.

Given that entrants must tell their “stories” in even fewer characters (122) than they could on Twitter (140), I question the narrative quality. As Antoinette Coleman, marketing manager for Golden Grahams, explains in an interview on SmartBlog on Social Media, the 122-character limit is of course so entrants can tweet and share their stories virally. The funniest stories, however, will be animated and published on the site.

You can see at right the one that made me laugh out loud.

Entry by Kathy Hansen. Learn more.