Continuing the list of stories you can tell in a cover letter:

• Stories — for new graduates — of how your education has prepared you for the targeted job.

New-grad stories don’t have to be about just your classroom education, but your extracurricular activities, leadership experience, sports-team membership, internships, work-study jobs, and the full spectrum of your college experience, as in these examples:

Having dedicated a substantial section of my undergraduate thesis to examining tradable permits as a way to regulate carbon emissions, I share the Sierra Club’s concern about global warming. As a recent graduate, I am looking to apply my knowledge in the real world.

As a student majoring in accounting at the University of Miami, I have gained significant knowledge in the accounting field. I understand that Baldwin wishes to hire someone who can develop an information system to track sales and inventory. I have developed several information systems related to customer orders using Microsoft Access, Microsoft Excel, and Visual Basic.

My recent experience and my classroom knowledge as an accounting major will benefit your company. As director of finance for an organization of 60 individuals, I functioned independently to reconcile bank statements and accounts receivable, billing accounts receivable, prepare accrual journal entries, generate financial statements, create an incentive program, and establish a computerized accounting system. Just as I achieved these goals effectively, I will be productive, proficient, and accurate for your company as well.

Through my internship with Blue Cross-Blue Shield I’ve fully deployed my marketing skills. I conducted a research study on the motivational behavior of the charitable donors by using communication skills and several business software programs. I have also successfully filled a local grocery store with campus faculty to participate in Celebrity Baggers during my first month as an intern.

As a computer lab assistant I gained invaluable hands-on experience in computer software problem-solving and was promoted to assist professors in coordinating and implementing technical software seminars. My effective interaction with the faculty led to my selection for a highly prestigious position as co-teacher of a university class designed to orient first-year students with college life. I took full responsibility for the theme, syllabus, class discussions, and lectures.

My resume shows that I’m a college student, but I am not a typical undergraduate. I am a highly motivated self-starter. I established a house-painting business to contribute to my college costs. As rush chairman of my fraternity, I was motivated to make my organization the best. While only eight new members were initiated the year before I took office, 22 new members pledged when I held the position. Nationals recognized this accomplishment when we received a special award for recruitment.

• Stories that describe how well you fit in with the organization’s culture, values, and mission.
  Robert Frey, who describes himself as a “fact-based storyteller” teaches successful proposal-writers to “kiss the customer’s mission” (where the customer in this case is the employer), meaning to show you understand the employer’s mission and can demonstrate how it relates to what you can bring to the organization.

  In addition to my undergraduate background in business and sales, I have interned with the Sheraton St. Augustine, where I played a key role in selling the five-star hotel’s accommodations to journalists and tourists from all over the world. Add to that experience my understanding and appreciation for the sport of golf, and you have the perfect addition to your golf-equipment sales team.

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  I’ve spent considerable time researching companies by talking to happy employees. From that research, I know that Stocks Unlimited is a great company to work for, with a friendly environment. It’s an organization in which I know I can contribute my skills and talents to their full potential to benefit the firm. I am impressed with your company values; you treat customers the same way you would want to be treated, and I would be proud to part of your team.

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  I am excited about your agency’s mission “to conserve, protect, and enhance fish and wildlife and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people” and I am more than ready to assist those “who work to save endangered and threatened species; conserve migratory birds and inland fisheries; and manage offices and field stations.”

• Stories describing long-term interest in, knowledge of, and admiration for the organization you’re targeting.

Handle this type of story carefully so that it is framed in terms of how you will benefit the employer — not how working for your long-admired employer will fulfill your career dreams. Also be careful about “preaching to the choir;” don’t tell the reader things about company that he or she already knows. Employer-admiration stories could include your experiences as a customer of the organization such as in the first two examples:

As a seasoned cruise traveler and worker in the hospitality industry, I am well aware of your company’s outstanding status as an industry leader. My education and experience in marketing, customer service, sales, information systems, Spanish language, and worldwide travel equip me to enhance the success of Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines.

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I have long been an avid consumer of Volkswagen’s automobiles. I have a passion for the cars VW produces, and I know I can infuse this same energy in everything I do for you. I would be thrilled to contribute my automotive-design talents to your organization.

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More samples of company knowledge/admiration:

I have been both an admirer and enthusiast of Birnbaum Investments’ many subsidiaries and its ongoing quest to introduce new products that both diversify and capture various aspects of the tourist industry. Birnbaum appears to be the company for future innovation in tourism in Barbados, and I know I can contribute to its continued success.

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Having been previously employed at Walt Disney World, I completely understand that customer satisfaction is the main priority in achieving success in the theme-park business. An organization that prides itself on effective recruiting and retaining, training, and managing its employees is best equipped to cater to consumer needs in today’s competitive arena.

Parkerson Products’ commitment to hiring the best candidates is likely the reason for your first-rate reputation. I am convinced that I am the candidate who can contribute to Parkerson’s continued success. That’s the reason I am applying for the Product-Development Manager position that you advertised on Monster.com.

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Having studied Pinnacle’s achievements with admiration, I am aware that success at Pinnacle depends on the trainer’s ability to convince seminar attendees to enroll in in-depth training programs. I’ve used my talent for holding an audience’s attention to successfully sell household items every summer during my college years. Each summer, I surpassed my sales of the summer before and achieved the highest sales of any collegiate salesperson during the summer just passed.

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As a life-long animal lover, I was touched and inspired to read about VetMed’s recent success with medications to alleviate arthritis pain in dogs. I am extremely excited that, as a soon-to-be graduate in biology from the University of Tennessee, I am about to make my mark in the world of veterinary pharmaceutical research. I would most like to contribute to the research and development team at VetMed.

This type of story can be quite effective as the opening paragraph in your cover letter by grabbing the employer’s attention immediately:

What person interested in working in the rental-car business wouldn’t want to bring motivation and talent to the industry leader? My family is extremely brand-loyal to your company, never having even considered renting from any of your competitors. I am very interested in working in this industry, and that’s why I’m applying for your manager-trainee vacancy.

• Stories that reveal your personality.
  These are stories that inspire the employer to want to get to know you better and thus call you in for an interview. They could demonstrate your sense of humor, your work ethic, your compassion, or simply your humanness. They paint a meaningful picture of who you are:

  I am a builder. I don’t mean with hammer and nails, although I enjoy that kind of building, too. At my last employer, I built three organizations that filled specific niches within the parent company. I defined the departments’ roles, hired and trained more than 300 team members, and then built the capability. I found it equally rewarding to improve those organizations by adding systems and processes so the teams were recognized for their contribution. I applied my creativity, leadership and ability to navigate complex and abstract problems.

  I admit it. I’m a psychology geek. I have always had an interest in where our behaviors, thoughts, and personalities come from. Since I can remember, I would be in the library sifting through the philosophy and psychology shelves. I am an enthusiastic learner and problem solver. I am patient and compassionate and tend to make others feel at ease. I don’t judge people based on their successes; rather, I see trials and past experiences as an opportunity for growth and empathy.

  I would describe myself as a consistently positive person. My friends sometimes ask me how I can be so energetic. I’m proud of my efforts to pursue my dream of being a clinical dietitian. As you can see from my resume, I changed my career to become a dietitian. I had an interest in food and nutrition since I was a little girl and helped to develop recipes for patients who required food restriction. I strengthened my interest in clinical nutrition as I learned about the field on my own. When I found how clinical nutrition therapy functioned as a preventive medicine, I decided to become a registered dietitian.

  I once read that experience working in an insane asylum or as an animal trainer or juggler provides the best background for working as a graphic artist at a design firm. Frankly, I haven’t had any of those experiences, but I thrive on the pressure of a fast-paced and intense environment and can juggle several projects simultaneously. My fresh and innovative design skills, along with total Macintosh and PC proficiency make me the graphic artist you’ve been looking for.

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  In your opener, you can also introduce the idea that you will be revealing more of your personality in the letter:

  A resume can tell you only the bare bones of my story. This letter is to help you get to know me.

• Stories detailing problems you’ve solved for your employers:

  My analytical skills have contributed to my ability to solve challenging problems. At FoodAmerica, for example, sales quotas were not tied to financial objectives. I applied my creativity to devising a sales-forecasting system in which order files could be integrated with shipments and invoicing files, and SAS reports could be prepared each morning. I arranged for SAS reports to be e-mailed to each sales unit so all parties could see the sales status daily, ensured that the system tied sales quotas to financial objectives, and added a trend projection expert system to forecast which products would not make their objectives. This report contributed significantly to the successful startup of the Mighty Macaroni product line.
  

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  As a consultant at Connor Associates, I have proven myself as a team leader. For example, when the mainframe computer crashed last summer, and we lost months of crucial data, I motivated team members to pull extra shifts to duplicate the work in just a few weeks.
  

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  My broad-based background enables me to adapt well to building client relationships. In my current position, for instance, I identified and resolved customer issues with a computer manufacturer, resulting in a $1M contract. Not only did my company win the contract, but its management expressed the organization’s satisfaction by providing excellent word-of-mouth promotion of our services to its subsidiaries.

• Stories describing other accomplishments and successes. The story of your past performance shows that you are the best value choice for the employer because you’ve achieved the same kind of results the organization seeks, says Robert S. Frey, Senior Vice President at RS Information Systems, Inc. (RSIS), whom I interviewed for this book. Tell stories that vividly show how you’ve made a difference for your past employers:

  In my most recent music-industry position at BMG, I maintained $1 million project budgets and helped boost the record sales of artists such as Clay Aiken, Taylor Hicks, and Carrie Underwood. With great efficiency and productivity, I can oversee budget creation and negotiation for video and photo shoots, hire creative staff, and function as the liaison among artists, their management, and the label.
  

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  My immersion into the world of business and finance at Global Financial Advisors has prepared me for business consulting. As a rising adviser who regularly cold-called CEOs and owners of successful Atlanta corporations to persuade them to meet with me, I banked my success on the ability to think creatively, conceptualize on many levels, and communicate crisply. I effectively explained the value my firm could provide and demonstrated my competency in tax, legal, insurance, and investment realms. I helped clients understand complex ideas in simple terms, motivated them to action, and then collaborated with a team of Global associates to implement our ideas.
  

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  I have proven my ability to attract and keep customers through the excellent feedback and comments I’ve received from guests, many of whom have come back and requested me as their server. I’ve also demonstrated my ability to up-sell by producing total meal sales 15 percent higher than 80 percent of servers and increasing my sales by 20 percent in the past three months. I also won an award for highest beverage sales for a server.
  

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  While at Winona State University, I completed numerous programming projects and sharpened my leadership and interpersonal skills. I demonstrated these skills by organizing the 2005 Annual Programmers Dinner, which nearly 300 people attended.

• Stories that depict your motivation, enthusiasm, and passion for the job you seek. Words such as “passion” and “excited” jumped out at a focus-group participant when evaluating this sample letter. “These are things an employer looks for in a candidate,” the participant said. “You don’t want to hire someone that is simply there to do a job. You want them to have a desire and motivation not only for the position, but to help the company grow as well — and using those words depicts just that.”

  While completing my degree in media communications and technology last year, I cultivated a true passion for video work that I would like to contribute to Southeast NewsVideo.

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  Every morning I kick off the sheets and leap out of bed — thrilled to greet my new day and eager to engage all the challenges I will encounter. I can imagine the many challenges you face as the market leader that could benefit from my performance-management expertise as your Product Support and Training Manager.

• Stories describing specific projects you’ve led or collaborated on, including results:

  More than five years of high performance in retail banking and the direct-investment industry in a recently emerging market — Vietnam — has provided me with exceptional experiences and strong connections with decision-making officials in the private and public sectors. Leading a small team to reorganize a Vietnamese bank virtually from scratch, I was apprehensive over the overwhelming challenges, yet excited to exercise my leadership skills. The result exceeded all expectations; not only did we stabilize the bank, but we also managed to raise $2 million in equity. After completing the successful reorganization, I earned a promotion to deputy managing director, the youngest manager in the Vietnamese banking industry.

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  I have demonstrated my aptitude for client management and relationship building by successfully rebuilding a damaged relationship with a major financial institution and creating the flagship office for this global engagement team. In these capacities, I have consistently proven my ability to mold a diverse team of experts to form cohesive plans and successfully complete projects.

Stories of early interest in your career path and determination to reach your career goal. A participant in cover-letter focus-group research conducted for this book said that the following sample “creates a vivid picture in your mind and leaves a memorable impression with the reader:”

One of my most profound memories as a young child was the day I first flew on an airplane. I was traveling with my family to California, and I still remember the feeling of excitement as I held my mother’s hand and climbed the stairs into the immense red, white, and blue plane. That was my first of many flights on Delta, and I have never forgotten it. I am interested in fostering that same excitement in others by working for Delta as a training instructor.

More samples of early career interest:

• Six years ago when you hired me for my first job, I wonder if you realized that the experience would inspire my career. I want to thank you for giving me that first opportunity to explore retail, not only because I enjoy the work so much, but because I’ve learned enough to know that I want to make a long-term commitment to this field.
• You would have to look far and wide to find someone who could bring as much enthusiasm and creativity as I could to the position of assistant creative director of StoryDance. Ever since I attended StoryDance’s performances as a young child, I’ve had a vision of the kind of creativity and energy I could add to the program. I carried that vision all the way to college, where I majored in theater and minored in dance.

Unlike resumes with their clipped bullet points, cover letters offer the job-seeker much wider latitude to tell stories because letters are quite compatible with the narrative form. You can engage the employer, make an emotional connection, show results, and become instantly memorable by writing at least one paragraph in the form of a powerful story. Not all employers read cover letters (about a third don’t), but those who read, do really read the letter, unlike the resume, which they almost always skim.

• Enelow, W., & Goldman, S. (2005). Insider’s Guide to Finding a Job. Indianapolis, IN: JIST.

• Gladwell, M. (2005). Blink! The Power of Thinking without Thinking. New York: Little, Brown.

• Kraft, C. (2004, Nov. 9). Don’t just tell what you did, tell how you did it!. Gladiator newsletter.

• Quintessential Careers: Resume and CV Resources for Job-Seekers

• Ryan, L. (2005, Feb. 22). Multi-story resume, higher profile. Business Week Online.

• Whitcomb, Susan Britton, (2003). Resume Magic. Indianapolis, ID: JIST.

Here are sample story-based resumes and addenda to give you a better idea how to use storytelling in these documents:

• Walter Dietz Story Resume
• Sean Patrick Story Resume Addendum: Leadership Profile
• Wesley Edwards Story Resume
• Zhang Li “Story-Lite” Resume followed by Executive Performance Highlights Addendum
• Mathias Carroll Projects Supplement
• Georgia Lutz Bio Addendum

With some career experts predicting that traditional resumes may be on their way out, readers may question the notion of the storytelling resume. Citing online recruiting expert John Sullivan as well as Allan Schweyer of the Human Capital Institute, Deborah Dib prognosticates that “within a few years most companies who are hiring or recruiting online will use e-profiles in place of the traditional resume. E-profiles allow access to information that is sorted and easy to use.” Dib’s finger is on the pulse of those who predict that paperless recruiting will become the norm. While the resume may disappear from the online job search and morph into new forms and spin-offs, it will still be used for mailing, networking, and interviewing. No matter what form the resume takes, expert wordsmithing will still be required, Dib notes, “to compose keyword-rich online profiles and resume builders, and to develop compelling success stories for interviews.” A focus-group participant agrees, stating that “in the business world, there will always be a time and place when candidates will need a quick, concise, easily accessible summary of their skills. I think technology will continue to streamline the job application process, and resumes will adapt accordingly but never go away completely.”

It’s also just possible that the current business trend toward storytelling will move the resume to a more rather than less narrative form. As businesspeople recognize the power of storytelling and eschew emotionless data, PowerPoint presentations, dry analytical facts, and terse bullet points, they will be drawn to story-based resumes. As A Whole New Mind author Daniel Pink warns, “minimizing the importance of story places you in professional and personal peril.”

Employers and recruiters express a constant concern about finding candidates who are a good fit with their organizations, who will perform, and get results. Given that they fret about the ability to predict candidate performance before hiring, they should welcome information in the resume that helps them to get to know more about the candidate rather than less. In fact, it is not decision-makers’ distaste for rich information that is driving the current trend toward standardized profile forms that enable employers to compare apples to apples; instead, it is the revolution in Internet recruiting and job-hunting which has inundated employers with too many resumes to deal with. But as Pink points out, we have a “hunger for what stories can provide - context enriched by emotion, a deeper understanding of how we fit in and why that matters.”

Even if you’ve used storytelling to describe your accomplishments in your resume, space limitations have likely prevented you from providing much detail. Deborah Wile Dib, a CEO coach with multiple certifications in resume writing and career coaching, is an enthusiastic champion of the concept of resume addenda. Noting that these story-based addenda are “a good read,” she gives them a variety of titles, such as “Critical Leadership Initiatives,” “Marketing Milestones,” “Performance Milestones,” “Key Engagements” (for a consultant), “Career Success and Distinctions,” and “Major Campaigns.” Dib encourages clients to identify their “career-defining accomplishments” and then rank-order the top five that align best with the job-seeker’s targeted employers. For Dib, most accomplishments can be summed up in the phrase “accomplished solutions provider.” The employer, Dib notes, is primarily interested in whether the candidate can solve problems and make/save money. The addendum supplies information - that the more concise resume can’t accomplish - about the challenge the candidate faced and the process used to achieve the result, Dib says. To enhance the storytelling power of her resumes and addenda, Dib sometimes even breaks the cardinal resume rule against using the pronoun “I” in her documents. Also touting the idea of the resume addendum is well-known resume writer and career author Louise Kursmark, who refers to these addenda as “ROI documents,” replete with stories that illustrate the Return on Investment the employer will gain in hiring the candidate. Kursmark’s own special twist on the resume addendum is the Job Proposal, which tells a future story of what the candidate can do for the employer. The proposal presents the candidate’s understanding of the employer’s challenge, a section entitled “My Value” that explains how the candidate is the most qualified person to meet the challenge, and offers a “Proposed Solution.”

Dib cautions that not everyone involved in the hiring process likes resume addenda, and my PhD research bears out that caution. But as long as the employer also has your “story lite” resume, he or she can choose whether or not to review the addendum. Some recruiters in the focus-group research liked the option of being able to obtain additional information from addenda. One participant said, “I like addenda because they don’t get in my way, but if I choose to delve deeper when presenting to a hiring manager, the info is there.”

The addendum can also make an excellent artifact for your career portfolio, as described in the upcoming Chapter 6.

• Boosted sales rate by 200 percent in first year and 400 percent over five years, successfully capturing majority of engineering specification market.
• Revived branch image, upgraded technology and equipment, and re-established company as industry leader by increasing sales dramatically.
• Achieved 95 percent spend capture, 35 percent system operating and maintenance cost reduction, increased order visibility and leverage position, and enhanced supplier relationship management by executing successful integration of business units’ procurement and payables systems and processes.
• Reduced annual consulting costs by $1.4M, streamlined development processes, facilitated rapid turnaround of customer requests, and enhanced internal application-development and application-support capabilities by developing and executing plan to in-source numerous key IT functions.
• Achieved 25 percent call-back rate, 30 percent sales increase, and a reopened revenue stream by executing direct-mail initiative to contact dormant customers to provide name recognition reminder and publish service-option details.
• Saved company $13.75 million - $1.75 million in first year and $4 million annually for three consecutive years - by conceiving, designing, and strategizing to bring branch computer maintenance in-house.
• Saved weeks in project time by instituting structured project-management methodology.
• Increased recoveries from less than 2 percent of paid, to 5.7 percent of paid, resulting in $39.6 million in increased recoverables, by creating “Third Party Recovery Recognition Templates.”
• Reduced customer requests from 500 to 12 within three months by designing and implementing centralized customer task-tracking system.
• Reduced errors, saved time, achieved nearly a 100-percent paperless environment, and saved money by implementing central Web-based database that houses all client data, realizing remarkable return on equipment investment in less than a year.

Presenting your accomplishments in your resume represents a case where it’s OK, indeed desirable, to give away the end of the story first. Tell the Result (R) of your Action (A) first so it catches the employer’s attention. Then, ideally, describe the Situation (S), Problem (P), or Challenge (C) that your Action addressed. Quantify wherever possible.

Note in these examples from diverse resumes that, because of resume space limitations and employers’ preference for conciseness, the Situation, Problem, or Challenge is not always described:

• Produced sales growth from $50K in backlog to more than $31 million in backlog in three years by building high-performance, multifunctional/multi-discipline, sales team comprising professionals from multiple departments.
• Deflected 50 percent increase in electricity costs by designing/installing power factor correction systems.
• Reduced water usage by 80 percent by developing new cooling water temperature control system.
• Led national expansion of single-serve potato chip product — building US volume +33% — by utilizing US volume projections, international test market demands, and available capacity.
• Increased revenue by recruiting, training, and organizing efficient contract staff capable of faster processing time that optimized sales representatives’ performance.
• Began employment as fax runner whose superiors recognized exemplary professional skills and unsurpassed work ethic; promoted to administrative assistant, and promoted again to senior administrative assistant within a year.
• Achieved 36 percent rating increase in customer survey scores by creating and implementing two new staff training programs that heightened levels of guest satisfaction.
• Increased sales revenue by 15 million in one year by assembling dynamic marketing team, coaching team members, and implementing highly effective marketing strategy.
• Reduced unnecessary book purchases by developing Excel spreadsheet book inventory.
• Raised $250K in one evening by coordinating 85 volunteers for school auction/dinner and through sales of 800 silent and 40 live-auction items.
• Facilitated 55 percent increase in customer satisfaction and 50 percent increase in employee job satisfaction by flattening hierarchy from 10 functional areas to just two, guiding employees to redefine their jobs, creating efficient work processes, eliminating redundancies, and eradicating paperwork in organization formerly unresponsive to clients as well as inefficient, bureaucratic, and apathetic.

An important technique to enable your reader to interpret your Summary/Profile section as a story is to make it parallel, as though each bullet point is completing the same sentence. This kind of narrative flow helps readability enormously. Imagine that each Summary/Profile bullet point answers the question, “Who are you, and what can you do for our organization?” and finishes an unstated but understood sentence that begins: “I am a(n)…”

Let’s see how this formula works in practice:

• [I am a] Seasoned systems analyst with strong commitment to time and resource budgets, new-business development, strategic planning, innovation, technology trends, customer-service needs, and close collaboration with sales and marketing during development.
• [I am a] Competent problem-solver who resolved sales and shipping issues by creating internal customer-care system and saving 20 percent on shipping; researched and delivered Web conferencing service for sales that saved 30 percent of travel budgets.
• [I am a] Visionary innovator who partnered with another programmer to create pioneering language-learning software that earned national attention; served as lead analyst for revolutionary legal document generating and tracking product.
• [I am a] Technical guru who provided direct support for successful million-dollar negotiation with major print vendor and completed many successful major conversions from mainframe to mini-computer systems.
• [I am a] Strong communicator who was voted best specification writer — with least number of re-writes — by programmers and their managers.

You’ll note that the story-based grammatical structure of these parallel bullet points goes like this: [Adjective] [noun] [connecting words] [phrase describing skill/strength/expertise] [supported by quote, example, numbers]

• Highly motivated sales professional with excellent communications and presentation skills as well as a reputation for instantly developing rapport that produces immediate sales results while paving the way for future sales successes.
• Goal-driven IT operations and technical-support management professional with 15+ years of experience and commitment to delivering high-quality technical service and support to multiple IT customers concurrently.
• Master’s-level professional known for strong analytical and quantitative skills and applying sound research methodologies to assess needs, identify alternatives, and recommend strategies that facilitate optimal healthcare outcomes.
• Dedicated health and education professional who is uniquely qualified to deliver outside-the-box accomplishments in pharmaceutical sales through exceptional ability to synthesize and disseminate product knowledge and contribute immediately to your bottom line.
• Efficiency-driven call-center professional who upholds highest accuracy performance standards and operational effectiveness through genuine talent for motivational, interpersonal teaching and mentoring.
• Accomplished accounting professional and licensed CPA with extensive experience in developing and implementing highly efficient accounting systems that deliver accurate reporting and ensure compliance with established control policies and procedures.
• Accomplished QA professional with 15+ years of progressive experience and proven record of significant, successful contribution in wide range of organizations that previously had no quality standards or programs in place.
• Dynamic B2B/B2C technology marketing executive with exemplary career record of bringing products to market, precisely targeting consumer demographic while maximizing adoption and profitability.
• Conscientious direct caregiver who provides meticulous, fully attentive, individualized nursing care to meet complex array of patient needs by employing nursing process methodology including assessment, planning, implementation, and evaluation.
• Dynamic professional with strong commitment to women’s sports and proven track record as both competitor and event organizer.
• Highly proficient, multi-faceted professional with demonstrated ability to identify and define needs, formulate solutions, direct and supervise multiple participants, and capably juggle and effectively manage several priorities simultaneously.

• Dynamic MBA-level professional with more than seven years of experience in successful leadership of business and organizational turnarounds that involve multiple, complex dynamics and cross disciplines and management levels.
• PhD-level leader, change agent, and social activist who has developed broad range of programs and procedures that yielded cost effectiveness and maximum utilization of resources and accountability.
• Dynamic performer with background of achievement and success in entrepreneurial and business-development roles that have catapulted bottom-line revenues.
• Multi-faceted change-agent with significant human-resources experience who applies expertise in cross-functional process improvement to achieve meaningful organizational change.
• Entrepreneurial, outside-the-box, critical thinker with strong quantitative and research skills, functional IT skillset, and enthusiasm to deliver on front-line globalization issues.
• Goal-driven achiever with strong organization skills who performs as both versatile individual and team player with ability to quickly assess, comprehend, and manage customer relations while upholding company values.
• Accomplished project-management professional with more than 15 years of experience in capably and creatively delivering operating solutions through proficiencies in business analysis, problem-solving, process improvement, and software development.
• Self-motivated professional with strong financial skills who expertly manages multiple deadlined tasks, including accurate processing and reporting accounts payable/receivable, reconciliations, and payroll.
• Outgoing customer-service professional known for outstanding interpersonal, organizational, and prioritization skills, as well as people-management know-how that consistently elicits positive interaction with internal and external clientele.

Begin your Summary/Profile section with a bullet point that tells the story of your professional identity in a nutshell. It’s the most important bullet point because it puts you into focus, characterizes who you are, and tells the story of what you can contribute. If the reader should happen to read no further in your Summary/Profile section, he or she should at least have a sense of your essence from this first bullet point.

Some employers say they don’t like Summary/Profile sections because they are full of unsubstantiated fluff. Therefore, it’s incumbent upon the job-seeker to substantiate as much of the Summary/Profile section as possible — with stories, as well as with numbers, examples, and quotes from those who know your work. Any bullet points that are not substantiated in the Summary/Profile section itself should be substantiated later in the resume. Here are examples of story-substantiated bullet points:

• Demonstrated organizational skills at the highest level; successfully completed all assignments meeting all goals and timelines, from initiating complex and sensitive operations in the United States and abroad to establishing overseas office.
• Successfully deployed unsurpassed interpersonal skills during professional interactions with U.S. government personnel, representatives of Fortune 500 defense-industry corporations, and as an instructor/lecturer for business groups and government employees.
• Innovative decision-maker who consistently made informed purchasing choices on ERP and other software packages by developing fully operational, user-configurable, corporate intranet, and numerous in-house custom-built, Oracle-based applications.
• Accomplished facilitator with reputation for highly effective team-building skills proven through overcoming team resistance and collaboratively completing key intranet project well before four-month deadline.
• Enthusiastic self-starter who addressed seemingly insurmountable technical difficulties in software program that threatened timely document submission to National Drug Administration; research efforts resulted in software upgrade that enabled swift completion of time-sensitive documents.
• Solutions-oriented manager who overcame negativity of two unsuccessful prior project attempts by applying specialized project-management methodology and design techniques.

Twenty years ago or so, a Profile or Qualifications Summary section was somewhat unusual on a resume. Career experts trace the use of summaries and profiles, which include information about candidates’ qualities beyond their credentials, to the publication of the late Yana Parker’s The Damn Good Resume Guide in 1983. Today they are seen as an important resume element, consisting of 4-5 bullet points that encapsulate your top selling points.

So, a typical Profile or Summary section might consist of these items:

• Bullet point summarizing your professional identity in a nutshell. Tells the story of who you are.
• Bullet point addressing interpersonal communication skills and optionally including any applicable language skills. Tells the story of how well you communicate.
• One or more bullet points addressing key job-specific skills, ideally supported by stories, quotes from employers, or quantification.
• A bullet point addressing computer/technical skills.
• Optional bullet points addressing relocation, willingness to travel, work eligibility, or other contingencies, if applicable.

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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.

• Quantify. Employers love numbers. Atlanta-based resume writer Gayle Oliver refers to these numbers as “performance metrics,” for example:
  • Increased sales by 50 percent over the previous year.
  • Produced total meal sales 20 percent higher than those of the other servers in the restaurant.
  • Supervised staff of 25.
  • Served a customer base of 150, the largest on firm’s customer-service team.

• Use superlatives. As Donald Asher notes in his excellent resume reference for college students, From College to Career, you can impress employers with words such as “first,” “only,” “best,” “most,” and “highest.”


• Think about the critical success factors for the type of position you are targeting, advises Oliver. Tell a story of what it looks like to succeed in this kind of position. Brainstorm stories of how past employers defined you as successful.

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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.

• Humanize and personalize your resume. The trend in resumes has been to eschew personal information and interests. But this type of human-interest information can work for you as long as you relate it to professional skills. It also helps to reveal more of your story to the employer and portrays you as someone he or she would like to get to know better. For their book, Insider’s Guide to Finding a Job, Shelly Goldman and Wendy Enelow interviewed 66 top corporate human-resources executives, recruiters, hiring managers, and career experts, among them Bill Welsh of Equinox Fitness, who believes that personal information on a resume is important and that “the more he knows about someone, the more informed his hiring decision will be.” Revelation of personal interests and affiliations can indicate cultural fit with the prospective employer, create a bond with an interviewer with similar interests, and demonstrate transferable and applicable skills. For example, the following sample bullet point shows how a job-seeker might apply a slice of personal life to the corporate culture of the targeted employer.
• Avid outdoor enthusiast poised to contribute my passion for outdoor sports to your firm’s mission to promote the active lifestyle.
• It’s wise to be story-minded when composing your resume so that you know what to leave out. A resume is neither a job application nor a life history. It’s a marketing document, so it need not and should not be all-inclusive. Keeping your story - and better yet your branded story, as discussed in the upcoming Chapter 8 - in mind as you craft your resume can help you judiciously omit material that, in the words of David W. Brown, author of Organization Smarts, “doesn’t advance [your] personal narrative.” WorldWIT’s Ryan similarly notes that most resumes “tell us what we don’t need to know, for instance, the typical tasks in a Marketing Research Manager’s job.” She goes on to describe how most resumes read: “I did this job. I stopped that. I had these responsibilities.” Job-seekers need to dig deeper, Ryan exhorts. “What was your motivation?” she asks. “Surely you didn’t go through these experiences in a daze. What was going on during that time? You’ve built your career, thus far, from scratch. How and why?”
• Remember that you don’t have to tell the same stories on every resume you send out. The ideal scenario is to tailor your resume for every position you apply for so that you can change up your stories, selecting those that are most appropriate for the job at hand.

The resume is the trickiest component in career-marketing communication in which to tell stories. Here are some guidelines to keep in mind when creating a story-based resume:

• A commonly used section at the top of the resume, a Qualifications Summary or Professional Profile, provides an excellent vehicle for telling the story of who you are professionally. Later in this chapter we’ll see how.
• KPMG Principal Mary Anne Davidson observed on the HR.com Web site, “Candidates write about what their positions entailed and not what they actually did. So they tell us their job was to do XYZ. I know what controllers do. I know what recruiters do. I need to know what accomplishments you made in your role. This makes you different than another candidate.” Susan Britton Whitcomb, author of Resume Magic, one of the most highly recommended resume books on the market, calls accomplishments “the linchpin of a great resume.” Her chapter on accomplishments is one of the best sources to help you compose effective accomplishments stories.
• To a great extent, if a job activity cannot be portrayed as an accomplishment, it may not be worthy of mention in your resume. Thus, your resume should be primarily accomplishments-driven (rather than driven by duties and responsibilities), and accomplishments are best communicated in story form.
• Accomplishment stories should include the situation, problem, or challenge that contextualizes your achievement, the action you took, and the results you attained; however, you should tell this story in reverse order - results, action, problem/situation/challenge. Why? Because, as we noted earlier, the employer looks at your resume so quickly. Results need to be listed first for each accomplishment so these outcomes catch the reader’s eye. So, instead of SAR, PAR, or CAR stories, you’ll tell RAS, RAP, or RAC stories. We’ll see more information and examples later in this chapter.
• Some professional resume writers use the tactic of going easy on the story approach in the resume itself, but letting loose with stories of accomplishments, results, and outcomes in a resume addendum or career biography. Addendum examples will appear later in this chapter.
• Most employers prefer a resume that is formatted mostly in bullet points - which don’t exactly lend themselves to storytelling - You can tell stories in resume bullet points, but they must be concise, not wordy. Think of a story-based resume as “story lite.” You can go into more detail in a resume addendum, in your cover letter, and later in your interview. Focus-group participants emphasized the conciseness point repeatedly, strongly cautioning against wordiness, overblown adjectives, too much information, and the impact of accomplishments lost in a sea of text. One participant said, “If you could combine the brevity of [the non-storytelling resume] with the numerical details of [the story-based resume], that would be the preferred ideal.”

“Too long and boring” comprise two of the top complaints about most resumes voiced by Liz Ryan of WorldWIT. Contributing to a blog called “Get That Job!” Ryan cites one of her favorite resumes - from a controller who includes this telling line on his resume: “Unusually wicked sense of humor for a Finance type.” Ryan notes that “the human need for stories should be a vital clue to job-hunters, whose resumes often have as much dramatic punch as the back of a cereal box. Your resume is your marketing brochure. It has to tell your story.” She suggests reading through your resume with the fresh eyes of an employer who will wonder, “Who is this person?” An unnamed blogger on the blog Fincareer similarly writes that “by highlighting and interpreting experiences in light of the job or career alternative you are contemplating, your story will get the quality and coherence needed to win a recruiter’s trust and interest.” With a storied resume, you can often explain the rationale and value of what you’ve done.

Just as valuable as the resume itself is the process of compiling it, write Herminia Ibarra and Kent Lineback in Harvard Business Review, because “it entails drafting your story.” The authors advise that “everything in the resume must point to one goal - which is, of course, the climax of the story you’re telling.” They cite a job-seeker who better defined what excited her about her chosen field every time she wrote her story in a piece of job-search communication.

Most employers also want to see substantiation of your claims about yourself, which is something you can accomplish through storytelling. Too many resumes are collections of adjectives and meaningless puffery with no stories to back up their claims. In focus-group research conducted for this book, participants found a story-based resume (the Wesley Edwards resume, coming up later in this chapter) more memorable than one that did not contain story, noting that the storytelling resume “leaves more of an impression” and that it “lists actual numbers. And it allows the reader to understand in dollars what he’s accomplished.”

Two hilarious examples of story resumes appear on the Internet. One is a musical, animated creation that attracted a great deal of notice and was actually a fairly serious attempt to obtain a job. Another, from Allen Williams would seem to be a quite tongue-in-cheek incarnation of a resume.

The contemporary resume, with its bullet points and terse, clipped phrases, seems antithetical to any type of storytelling device. Some players in the hiring process, particularly recruiters, tend to want candidates to stick to the facts in their resumes. Others, however, especially those who make direct hiring decisions, appreciate a resume that opens a window to your personality through storytelling. In this 2002 book, Making Stories: A Practical Guide for Organizational Leaders and Human Resource Specialists, Terrence Gargiulo, for example, points out that human-resource managers prepare to interview candidates by reading resumes with their “story mind.” Putting himself into the mindset of HR people, he envisions using the information in the resume to “construct a story and image of the person.” As a job-seeker, you can help the hiring decision-maker by crafting a narrative that grabs the reader.

When read by human eyes, your resume will get the reader’s attention for only 2.5 to 20 seconds. In his popular book about intuition, Blink!, Malcolm Gladwell talks about “thin-slicing,” which he defines as “the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience.” Employers can be said to “thin-slice” when they glance at a resume. Rare is the employer who will read even close to the entire resume on the first pass. Yet they will usually put your resume into a “yes,” “no,” or “maybe” pile based on the tiny slice of your resume that actually catches their attention. That’s why compelling narrative can be key to intriguing your reader. The usual thin slices of your experience served up in a resume don’t enable you to weave a theme to resonate with the employer.

Bolles, Richard N. (2010). What Color is Your Parachute? Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press. New editions of this classic are published annually.

Enelow, W., & Goldman, S. (2005). Insider’s Guide to Finding a Job. Indianapolis, IN: JIST.

Hansen, Katharine. (2008). A Foot in the Door: Networking Your Way into the Hidden Job Market, Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press.

Quintessential Careers: The Art of Career and Job-Search Networking

Quintessential Careers: Informational Interviewing Tutorial

One of the most effective uses of networking is the potential to build an inner circle of close advisers who can guide and support you through your job search. They’re the ones that you can always feel comfortable calling on for advice, the ones who will conduct practice interviews with you, and the folks who can review and critique the stories you develop for all phases of the job search. They can help you develop and tell your stories. Ask for feedback from them about your strengths and weaknesses, and build stories around your strengths as perceived by those who know you best.

Test out your stories on your close inner circle. Ask them to place themselves in the employer’s mindset as they listen to or read your stories, and request that they react as an employer would react. You can then use their feedback to refine and polish your stories. Writing on Business Week Online, Liz Ryan, founder and CEO of WorldWIT (Women. Insight. Technology.) recommends trading resumes with colleagues and asking the reader to “look for the story that comes through.”

Expand your network by conducting informational interviews. Learn about industry trends through these interviews so you can tailor your stories to what’s happening in your field. Ask interviewees what the top people in your field offer that others don’t, and then incorporate your matching qualities into your stories.