Once you’re familiar with these basic accomplishments-driven job-search story structures, the next step is determine what characteristics you wish to showcase about yourself in your stories. The answer is to tell stories that demonstrate the skills, abilities, values, and knowledge that employers seek in the type of job and industry you’re targeting.

• Identify a dozen or so help-wanted ads or Internet job postings that typify the kind of job you seek.
• List keywords that describe the skills and characteristics required for these jobs. See the end of this chapter for a list of skills and characteristics that employers typically seek.
• Now, highlight all the skills and characteristics keywords the ads or job postings have in common and make a list of these frequently appearing skills/characteristics.
• For each skill/characteristic listed, compose a story that illustrates how you have successfully demonstrated that skill or characteristic in your career - or even in your personal life.
• Be sure to compose stories that come from a variety of aspects of your life and career; don’t focus on just one job or extracurricular activity, for example. Draw your stories from fairly recent experience. Employers what to know what you’ve done lately that could benefit their organization.

• Tell still more detailed versions of your stories, composed in a conversational style, for job interviews:

  My company was struggling with scheduling employees, monitoring their time and attendance, as well as tying these elements into payroll. We needed a system, preferably online, that would make these tasks more efficient, save time, and reduce errors. When management decided to go with an outside vendor for the new system, they chose me to head up the project team. We were on a tight, two-month deadline, but I led the team to surpass not only the deadline, but the expected results. Under my guidance, we got the vendor’s system online so successfully that we reduced payroll discrepancies by 25 percent. Since we’ve operationalized it, the company has saved time in scheduling employees and resolving timesheet-related issues; in fact, these processes take half the time they used to. By customizing reports to track labor and benefits allocation, we also cut time spent on reports by a quarter. We did such a great job and made the functions so much more efficient that the vendor recognized us with its Certificate for Management’s Commitment for Successful Implementation and Design Contribution to Improve Efficiencies.

  You can read more about interviewing stories in the upcoming Chapter 7.

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  Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling that Propels Careers, Quintessential Careers Press, ISBN-10: 1-934689-00-9. Find out the ways you can own the entire book.

  

Develop stories of various lengths and containing assorted amounts of detail for each element of your job search:

• Short bullet-point version for your resume. Because a resume needs to attract attention quickly, it’s a good idea to tell each story so that the result comes first, as in the following bullets about a job-seeker’s accomplishment:
• Beat two-month deadline for operationalizing online scheduling, time/attendance, and payroll system by overseeing fast-track implementation from outside vendor.
• Reduced payroll discrepancies 25 percent and time spent scheduling employees and resolving timesheet-related issues by 50 percent.
• Decreased time spent on reports by 25 percent by customizing reports to track labor/benefits allocation.
• Earned vendor’s Certificate for Management’s Commitment for Successful Implementation and Design Contribution to Improve Efficiencies.

You can read more about resume storytelling in the upcoming Chapter 4.

• More detailed paragraph version for your cover letters. In the following example, the same story is told in paragraph form in the job-seeker’s cover letter. Note that a cover letter should not rehash the resume, so even if you are highlighting the same accomplishment in both documents, vary your language and the way you frame the story:

  I demonstrated my strong project-management skills when the project team I led exceeded all expectations while implementing an outside vendor’s system for online scheduling, time/attendance, and payroll. Not only did we crush our two-month deadline, but we also reduced payroll discrepancies, slashed in half the time spent scheduling employees and resolving timesheet-related issues, and cut time spent on reports. The icing on the cake was earning the vendor’s Certificate for Management’s Commitment for Successful Implementation and Design Contribution to Improve Efficiencies.

You can read more about cover-letter stories in the upcoming Chapter 5.

In addition to the change stories we’ve seen in Chapter 1, job-seekers need to know how to develop stories about skills, abilities, expertise, personal traits and characteristics, values, and accomplishments. But how do you develop the stories, how do you know which of these qualities to develop stories about, and how do you know how to frame your stories? First, you need to know how to formulate or structure a story.

Story Formulas Career experts have developed myriad formulas and clever acronyms for how to structure stories in the job search. These formulas have in common the idea of setting the scene for your story by describing the situation, problem, or challenge you faced, explaining what action you took to address the situation, solving the problem or meeting the challenge, and explaining the result of your actions. Results expressed quantitatively, in numbers and percents, for example, are especially effective. An optional inclusion is the learning you gained from this experience. Some of the common formulas and acronyms include:

• CAR: Challenge, Action, Result
• CCAR: Context, Challenge, Action, Result
• PAR: Problem, Action Result
• PARLA: Problem, Action, Result, Learning, Application
• SAR: Situation, Action, Result
• SCARQ: Situation, Challenge, Action, Results-Quantified
• SHARE: Situation, Hindrance, Action, Results, Evaluation
• SIA: Situation, Impact, Analysis
• SMART: Situation with Metrics (or Situation and More), Actions, Results, Tie-in
• SOAR: Situation, Obstacle, Action, Result
• STAR: Situation, Task, Action, Result

These story formulas are most often prescribed for interviews; thus, you can find a story example for each upcoming in Chapter 7 on interview stories.

In developing your foundational story, ask yourself, what story can I tell that best captures the quintessential me? (And, as mentioned earlier, you may find that you need more than one story to express the quintessential you.) Develop that story or stories, and the stories in Chapter 3 and beyond will be much easier to generate.

Quintessential You Story Resources Denning, S. (2005). The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Joe Lambert, Digital Storytelling Cookbook.

Simmons, A. (2006). The Story Factor: Inspiration, Influence, and Persuasion through Storytelling. Cambridge. MA: Basic Books.

Andy’s dramatic post-hurricane story describes the gratification gained from helping in a time of crisis:

In the fall of 2004, the beginning of my senior year of high school, hurricanes Charley, Francis, Ivan, and Jeanne pounded the state of Florida. My hometown is centrally located between the east and west coasts, sheltered by miles of land from tidal surges and the fiercest winds of the storms. However, that is not to say that we went unaffected. The days before and after the brunt of the storms were still plagued with incessant rain. One or possibly two storms in a season would have caused no serious problem; that would have been normal. But four? The infrastructure of the city was not designed to withstand so much rain and wind in such a short time. By the time the third storm approached, parking lots and streets were under water. Neighborhoods around town were flooded, cars were submerged, and trees were uprooting from the completely saturated soil.

My father and I decided to drive through the neighborhood just down the road from our house and see what damage the storm had done to our area. As we drove along the streets there was not too much to see. There were some downed trees in yards, leaves and small branches everywhere, and flooded ditches. As we neared the back of the neighborhood I noticed a group of two or three men working with buckets, brooms, and a small pump on generator power to move the runoff water that was approaching a house. In an instant my father and I recognized one of the men and stopped immediately. The man so desperately trying to save his house from flooding was my dentist, Dr. Dutter. He has been my dentist as long as I can remember. I rode the same bus as two of his daughters in elementary school. We got out and Dr. Dutter came to greet us in the midst of his frantic effort to save his house (uninsured from floods) from the rising water. The problem was that they were unable to move the water fast enough and far enough away to make any progress.

Read the rest of Andy’s story in the extended entry.

Matt’s story demonstrates his persistence:

One month, during my apprenticeship under a Korean master potter, I experienced a great deal of bad luck with the pieces I was making, mostly smaller pieces. Thunder shook the studio enough to knock one piece off a shelf during a storm; another piece melted onto mine in the kiln. For the next month I worked on the biggest and best piece I had ever made. It took an entire month for this one piece alone. One day, I came in to put the finishing touches on it before it would be ready to be fired. My streak of bad luck had not ended because I came in to find a pile of clay pieces from my collapsed artwork. I found out that the clay I had used was bad, and of course decided to find a new, more reliable clay company to buy my clay from.

So after a month of work all gone down the drain on what was to be the best piece I had ever made at the time, my persistence and commitment to excellence would not let me give up, even in what seemed like the worst streak of luck in the world. I was disappointed and frustrated, and at the point where most people may have just given up entirely, but I used it to fuel my goal of making the piece even better this time. I took another month working from scratch with new clay from the beginning all over again. I finally finished it.

Read the rest of Matt’s story in the extended entry:

Shelley’s story illustrates how an early event that affected a family member set Shelley on her career path:

Everyone has a childhood memory that influences the choices that they make and alters the path that they take in life. This is my story that influenced my life decisions.

I can still remember August of 1995; it was my favorite time of the year because all the neighborhood children would gather at the pool and go swimming. I was swimming underwater watching all the kids play, but my sister is the person who stood out to me. I can still picture the sparkle of her tears rolling down her face while she sat on the pool steps watching all the other kids have fun. I just remember thinking how could someone be so mean and irresponsible. The devastation happened three months earlier.

In May, my mom decided to take my sister and me to a new lake the city just built. My sister went swimming that day. Afterwards she started feeling sick. The next day at school my sister was playing the telephone game at school, and one of the kids whispered in her ear the word, but my sister couldn’t hear her, so she whispered again, and she still couldn’t hear her. My sister realized that there was something wrong with her ears. After school my mom took my sister to the doctor’s office, and the doctor discovered that she had bacteria in her ears that was causing tumors. Over the next couple of months my sister had to get numerous operations on her ears, but the damage was too severe. After numerous operations my sister lost complete hearing in her left ear and partial hearing in her right ear.

Read the rest of Shelley’s story in the extended entry:

Craig’s story discloses his deeply rooted commitment to teamwork, motivational skills, and doing what it takes to succeed:

During my earlier days I was an avid soccer player; I lived for early Saturday mornings. Getting up early to get my equipment together, lacing up my cleats, and the fellowship that I got from my teammates were unsurpassable. However, it was not all fun and games on the field. As team captain I had a duty and responsibility to my team to make sure we were achieving our goals through a strong work ethic, and a strong commitment to our team.

Read the rest of Craig’s story in the extended entry.

Abbie’s story reveals how she learned to embrace being outside her comfort zone after her first public-speaking experience:

My hands were shaky and palms were sweaty as I walked up to the podium at the Rotary Club’s biweekly meeting. I was presented an award as my middle school’s eighth grade Student of the Month and asked to give a brief speech to the members. It was my first speech in front of a crowd of people, and after being home-schooled in seventh grade, I had become very introverted and uneasy around large groups of people. My heart raced as I began the first sentence of my speech. “I would like to thank the Ro-Ro-Rotary Club…” Oh no! I had already made a mistake, and I had not even finished the first sentence. My mind raced, and all I could think about was how embarrassing it was to mess up the very name of the club that was giving me an award.

Afterwards, I stayed around to talk to a few of the Rotarians. Their reactions to my speech were completely opposite from what I had expected. Instead of mentioning my mispronunciation of the Rotary Club’s name, they congratulated me and said how well I did. I was confused by their kindness, but began to feel a little bit better about my actions. It was that day that I realized I had a lot of work to do.

[Read the rest of Abbie’s story in the extended entry.]

What do we learn about Kellie from the story in the previous entry?

• She is compassionate.
• She is curious and eager to learn.
• She cares enough about patients to go far beyond the requirements of her job to give them comfort.

If Kellie stated on her resume or in an interview that she is curious, eager to learn, compassionate, and dedicated to patient care, none of those claims would be as believable or compelling as telling this story. She may not ever be in a situation to tell this entire story during her job search, but by developing the story as a first step, she has gotten to know herself better and identified some of the key characteristics about herself that she will want to feature in her job search.

We’ll look at more sample Quintessential You stories in upcoming entries. Like Kellie’s story, these are poignant. But notice that unlike Kellie’s story, these spell out the “moral” or lesson learned. If you compare them with Kellie’s story, you may discover that sometimes the story is actually more powerful if the audience is left to draw its own conclusions about the characteristics exemplified. The audience does not necessarily need to be hit over the head with what the story means.

While you may use your Quintessential You Story only as a starting point for your own story-development purposes, it’s helpful to imagine that the audience for this story is someone who could hire you or who knows someone who could hire you.

Whatever prompt or approach you choose to develop your Quintessential You Story, the bottom line is that it should convey a strong sense of who you are, the essence of your being, the core of your character. The following sample stories do just that.

First in a series of Sample Quintessential You Stories

For several semesters, I have assigned my students to write a Quintessential You Story. Here is one of my favorites by a student named Kellie:

A few months back I began working at a hospital where my mom has been a nurse for 10 years. I have thought about working in the health care industry for a while, but I was never quite sure it was for me. I received a job as a unit clerk in the Intensive Care Unit/Neuroscience Intensive Care Unit. My job description was to put in doctor’s orders for each patient, monitor the patients’ EKGs, file papers, answer phones, and to keep supplies stocked. Patient care was not a part of my job, but I was always more than willing to help a nurse when needed, knowing that I would learn more about what I wanted to do.

I went to work at 6:30 a.m. as usual and started all of my normal tasks for both units and noticed this little old man waving at me every time I would pass his door. I waved to him a few times with a smile on my face and continued with what I was doing. After about the fourth or fifth wave, I became curious about why he was so interested in waving to me.

I walked into his room and decided I would talk to him to see if maybe he needed something, or if I could get his nurse for him. When I entered the room, he immediately called me Kelsie, which is ironically close to my name, and I had yet to introduce myself. I introduced myself and asked him if he needed any help, and he said no, but I shouldn’t play games with him; he knew my name was Kelsie, and he started to laugh. In talking with him for the next few minutes I continued to correct him when he called me by the wrong name, and he continued to correct me.

[Read the rest of this story in the extended entry]

Before you begin developing stories about how you’ve handled change (Ch. 1) and how you’ve demonstrated other skills (Ch. 3), you will likely find it useful to develop one or more stories that capture the essence of who you are. Your starting point for all job-search stories should be a narrative that truly reveals your character and what makes you unique. The story might disclose what makes you tick, what drives you, what you value, what your goals are, how behave in a crisis (Simmons, 2001) or, as outlined in Chapter 1, a time of change.

You may not use this story in your actual job search, but you’ll use it as a starting point to help you get to know yourself better and draw from it to develop additional stories that illustrate skills and accomplishments.

This type of “you” story is not my original concept. Annette Simmons has coined the Who Am I Story, while Steve Denning dubs his the Who Are You Story. Simmons’ The Story Factor and Denning’s The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling respectively offer excellent techniques for developing these stories.

Denning, for example suggests as starting points a story about a favorite place of your youth, a story of overcoming adversity or an obstacle, a tale involving someone admirable or influential, or narrative about a significant event from your past.

Simmons recommends identifying a quality about yourself and then developing a story about a time you shined with this quality, a time you blew it, a mentor who taught you about the quality, or a book or movie that embodies the quality.

Similarly, Joe Lambert, author of the Digital Storytelling Cookbook, suggests developing a story about an accomplishment.

Decisive moments (Lambert) or turning points are also excellent fodder for the Quintessential You Story and often originate, as Denning points out, in late adolescent years, when young people are leaving the safety of their families and determining their purpose in life.

The various types of “prompts” or starting places for the Quintessential You Story suggest that you can actually have more than one story. You may want to develop multiple stories that illustrate different aspects of your character.

The experts suggest setting a positive tone for your story. Even if you tell a dark story, explain how you derived something positive from the experience. For example, my son lived a story in which he was traumatized in high school when two friends - star-crossed lovers - committed suicide by throwing themselves in front of a train. Eventually, though, my son gained an appreciation for the joy and exhilaration of being alive and a desire to love and be loved.

Some change isn’t instigated by the organization at all, but by the organizational member who decides to change careers, an increasingly common phenomenon. In listing 21st-century human-resources trends, nonprofit CEO John McMorrow predicted that career change would become the rule rather than the exception, in part because of the “erosion of the implied good-faith contract between employer and employee.” Career-changers, too, should be prepared to tell deft stories of why they made the change and how they’ve adapted, as in the example in the extended entry:

You can find some additional career-change stories at the Web site of DBM, a global human-capital management-services firm (While the purpose of the stories is to promote DBM’s services, the storytelling in them provides some good models).

Telling compelling stories as you transition from one role to the next, one organization to the next, helps the listener feel invested in your success, a scenario that bodes well when the storyteller is a job-seeker, and the listener is an employer, contend Harvard Business Review writers Ibarra and Lineback. The authors describe a worker who developed and told change stories about a bankruptcy, a turnaround, and a rapid reorganization, eventually garnering referrals to employers and job interviews. In another example, a worker learned more about her career passions and became more committed to a planned career change each time she told her story by writing a cover letter, participating in a job interview, or networking with friends.

Change skills should be a major focus of the stories you tell as you progress from one organization to the next. This table summarizes how scholars and experts characterize these skills.

In my senior campaign-management job, I was the pinnacle person for a diverse group of project managers. I had many representatives from all the product bases constantly coming to me to develop databases of customers they could sell to. They wanted to know who they could market to. I would collaborate with them, asking questions like, what’s the budget, how many pieces do you want to direct mail? Or do you want to call these people? What media will you use? I worked to ensure each group got all the demographics it wanted. I’d pull the requirements into the data. And I’d be darned if the group didn’t change its mind and ask for a different demographic. Or something unpredictable like a hurricane would mean the group couldn’t mail to a certain region. So, I’d have to throw all the data back in to the pond and re-fish. And the changes wouldn’t happen with just one group; they would happen with all of them at one time. I dreaded my pager going off at 7 a.m. because a project manager had a thought while sleeping last night: “Ooh, I would love to see how many prospective customers wear toenail polish.” But whatever their requirement was, I said, “I’m on top of it.” I enjoyed the analytic aspects and the busyness and the constant go, go, go. Change drives me. It’s something I enjoy because it’s an extra challenge.

The bank in which I worked instituted a policy that centralized the lending process. An application was to be taken from the client and sent off to be approved or declined, processed, prepared, and returned to the branch to be signed by the client. While the process was streamlined, it also took away valuable face-to-face knowledge about the client and the loan. If the employee did not have any prior lending experience, he or she couldn’t answer simple loan questions from the client. While I appreciated the newly created time in my schedule, I felt that the clients were being slighted. I proposed to my boss a small adjustment that would permit brief face time with the client. My boss implemented my idea, and now we have the best of both worlds, face-to-face time with clients without taking significant time away from the streamlined process.

In my current job, I am working on a project to increase efficiencies in the customer-service area, one component of which is to better control the way customer service handles the mail. I questioned the administrative clerk, who’s responsible for receiving and distributing the mail, about how she does her job. She gathers mail from the P.O. box, reads the recipient, and passes mail around to be handled. I asked her what would happen if mail is lost. How would we track it? If someone doesn’t handle the sender’s inquiry in a timely manner, how can we know? I presented with her many questions of real and hypothetical situations where the ball was dropped somewhere, so I could find out from her if she had a plan in place to deal with those situations. The clerk at first, felt confident in her work, took great pride in being industrious, and didn’t feel passing mail around was a broken process, but after our conversation, she began to see the situation from my point of view and became receptive to new ideas and change. I needed and attained her buy-in so that I could create change and add value to her job. Together, we’ve developed a process to ensure that customer inquiries don’t slip through the cracks.

The strategic repositioning and closing of the training center where I am director of organizational development has been a significant change. A major contributor to the stress has been the high level of ambiguity during the past year and the fact that people are at different places in the grief and transition process at the same time. My style in times of stress and ambiguity is to try and find something productive I can do both personally and for the larger community. So, I have chosen to deal with this change by being proactive and leading an effort to offer career-enrichment programs at our sister training center. I’ve also collaborated with outside vendors to design a development program to support supervisors and staff through this transition, provided one-on-one coaching for the center’s leadership, and provided individual sessions for teams. These sessions have been well attended, and I’ve received very positive and appreciative comments from staff members who attended them.

I was a consultant, for a company that had been under the umbrella of a large government contractor that decided to sell off its commercial division to focus on its military applications. A venture-capital group came along and bought the company, which then lost its controller to the original owner, the government contractor. The newly purchased company had tried to replace the controller, but the new hires just didn’t stick. It was a very challenging environment. I was there for six months and got them through their first year-end close and their first audit as the new company. I stayed with them long enough to where they got their new controller on board, and I got him settled in for a couple of months and fully trained. As a consultant you have to be smart and fast because the client wants to see results quickly. You’ve got to be able to very quickly absorb the basic organizational structure and learn the key players. Then you have to quickly learn their software and processes - and look for ways to improve them.

Storytelling provides an innovative way for you to enter organizations and to thrive within ever-changing organizations, and change supplies an advantageous backdrop for storytelling. You can distinguish yourself from the competition by, for example, telling stories in resumes and cover letters as well as during job interviews of how you have embraced change as an opportunity instead of an obstacle, as in these next examples, which may provide inspiration for your job search or quest for promotion. To garner more ideas for the kinds of skills and aptitudes around which you can tell change stories, see Carol Goman’s Change-Adept Questionnaire.

More examples appear in Chapters 3 through 8.

Change is without doubt disruptive and traumatic, and when it affects you, your natural inclination might be to flee that employer, resist the transformation, cope with it - or you can capitalize on it. You can grab the opportunity that change presents to develop new self-concepts, specific skills, and mental attitudes for handling, leading, communicating, and taking advantage of organizational change. Those skills will make you more marketable when you decide to leave your employer.