Tell Me About Yourself

Tell Me About Yourself Now Available for Kindle

2012-04-21T16:23:29Z

Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling to Get Jobs and Propel Your Career is available for Kindle.

Find it here for $9.60.

The companion Tell Me MORE About Yourself: A Workbook to Develop Better Job-Search Communication through Storytelling is also available as a Kindle edition for $2.99, same price as the PDF version.

Companion Workbook Is Here!

2011-09-23T22:16:01Z

I have met my self-imposed deadline to complete Tell Me MORE About Yourself: A Workbook to Develop Better Job-Search Communication through Storytelling by today. (The plan was to offer it by the end of summer; I settled for the first day of fall.)

You can check out the table of contents here: TellMeMoreContents.pdf

I’m selling the workbook for the low, low, low, low price of $2.99 (!!!) through Google Checkout. Here’s the link.

The workbook is intended as a companion to my 2009 book, Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling to Get Jobs and Propel Your Career. It is both an update and extension of that book.

In the time since Tell Me About Yourself was published, I’ve learned an enormous amount and gained many new ideas and insights (most of them reported here in this blog) about using story in job search and career from colleagues in the storytelling, career, and marketing sectors. This workbook offers a way to expand on the ideas and concepts of Tell Me About Yourself.

The workbook also provides a way for users to implement the ideas and concepts in a practical, hands-on way. Since Tell Me About Yourself was published, readers have asked such questions as:

How do you tell a good story in the job search?
How do you find your stories?
How can my stories have the most impact?

Thus, this workbook is intended as the nitty-gritty how-to that goes beyond the concepts and examples in Tell Me About Yourself.

Do you need to have read Tell Me About Yourself to benefit from the workbook? I would recommend it so you understand the principles and benefits of storytelling in the job search. But you don’t necessarily have to buy a copy. A free earlier edition is online. Anytime I refer users to Tell Me About Yourself in the workbook, I give the page numbers from the print edition and the Web address of the online edition.

The workbook follows some of the content of Tell Me About Yourself closely, especially in story development, resumes, cover letters, and interviewing. I felt the content of Tell Me About Yourself was largely sufficient in explaining story concepts in areas such as networking, personal branding, portfolios, and workplace storytelling; thus, the workbook touches on them only briefly or not at all.

The workbook also adds a new content area that was not in Tell Me About Yourself at all. The entire first chapter is devoted to using story to help users determine a career path.

Examples of Telling Stories Backwards

2011-09-22T17:41:28Z

This post is intended to illuminate Exercise 4.A.2 in Tell Me MORE About Yourself: A Workbook to Develop Better Job-Search Communication through Storytelling by providing examples of telling SAR/CAR/PAR stories backwards:

[Result] Ensured revenue flow that met payroll needs [Action] by initiating new distribution plan and advertiser incentives after Hurricane Katrina wiped out newspaper’s distribution channels.

[Result] Spearheaded retail chain’s most successful charity fundraising event — more money than had ever been raised by any store in the chain — [Action]by challenging staff to develop high-profile idea to help the community [Situation]after corporate office criticized store’s weak response to company commitment to giving back.

[Result] Cut turnover in half [Action]by conducting aggressive research, designing a system to track projects, and implementing leadership program to challenge workers [Situation]after lack of company growth resulted in huge turnover problem in technical staff.

[Result] Cut receiving time from two or three days to less than six hours from the time the truck hit the dock [Action] by completely overhauling stockroom organization [Situation] when holiday season resulted in double shipments and demanded a new process.

Use Stories to Prove Your Skills

2011-09-07T15:57:24Z

How do you convince employers that you possess the skills required to perform a job you want — especially if you are changing careers and have not yet demonstrated your skills in your targeted career?

By telling stories about how you’ve effectively use those skills in other contexts. This article tells you why and how to do so.

For years, we’ve touted the idea of portraying skills as transferable on resumes, cover letters, and other job-search communications. In our article What Do Employers Really Want? Top Skills and Values Employers Seek from Job-Seekers, we present numerous resume bullet points eloquently describing skills (Example: “Flexible team player who thrives in environments requiring ability to effectively prioritize and juggle multiple concurrent projects.”) But even when a job-seeker uses articulate bullet points like these, he or she needs to support them with real evidence of having performed those skills in the past.

Meaningless lists of their transferable skills in job-search communications, in fact, are a major peeve of columnist Liz Ryan, who complains in an article on Glassdor.com, that “people are not actually ambulatory sets of disembodied, abstract skills. Describing ourselves as packages of skills is about the worst way imaginable to get a hiring manager excited about us.”

Ryan protests that hiring managers have no reason to trust job-seekers when they say they possess certain transferable skills. A hiring manager’s concept of a given skill could be very different from that of the candidate claiming to possess that skill. The hiring manager has no way of know how a claimed skill will manifest itself in diverse situations. Perhaps worst of all, lists of transferable skills lack context.

The solution is to tell stories that put transferable skills in context and describe how the job-seeker deployed them. “We need powerful stories to convey our power, battle-tested and concrete, to the person who’s reading our resume,” Ryan says. Further:

Stories, in contrast to skills listings, are loaded with context. We’ll tell the reader about that business dragon we slew (a cost overrun in Production, or a drop-off in attendance at our teleseminars) with plenty of detail about the situation we faced as we brought that dragon down. That’s when our job-search pitch has power! … Trumpeting our fabulousness sans context, proof or relevance is a waste of time. Use your stories, instead, to make it clear how you’ve made a difference for your employers in the past.

And, author Alexandra Levit emphasizes that “the more drastic your reinvention, the more persuasive your story must be.”

Identifying Skills to Highlight in Your Stories
Here’s how to tell stories that demonstrate the skills that employers seek in the type of job and industry you’re targeting:

Identify a dozen or so Internet job postings that typify the kind of job you seek.
List keywords that describe the skills required for these jobs. See a list of skills and characteristics that employers typically seek.
Now, highlight all the skills keywords the job postings have in common and make a list of these frequently appearing skills. Another technique is to copy the text from one or more job postings you want to target and then create a “tag cloud,” using a tool such as TagCrowd or Wordle. The skills words that appear the largest in the tag cloud are the ones that should get the most emphasis in your skills stories. To see an illustration of this technique, check out this post on our Quintessential Resumes and Cover Letters Tops Blog.
For each skill 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.

Story-framing Devices with Examples
Keeping in mind that a successful story must be true and told in context, consider these ideas for story-framing so your collection of stories comes from various perspectives:

A time in your life when this skill was tested.
Example: I solve problems every day in my job, but one recent example I had that truly tested my problem-solving skills involved a woman who called me to question why we refunded part of her premium to her. She’s a new policy-holder who was quoted $2,900 for an annual premium and paid that amount, but in the computer, her annual premium was about $2,500, so we refunded her the difference. My first hunch was she received a discount for paying in full, but when I calculated the discount percent, it was not adding up. After about two or three iterations of trying various combinations of discounts, I still was unable to figure out why the quote and actual premium were different and figured I was not looking for the right root cause. I decided to manually price her policy from the ground up, and during the process I happened to notice her birthday on her application was written ambiguously and could have been interpreted as 1925 or 1928. I calculated quotes for both ages and realized the reason for the difference. I honored the lower rate since the payment transactions were fully completed.

A time when you failed to live up to this skill and decided never to let it happen again.
Example: My leadership skills were called into question by my first evaluation as a district manager. I was rated much lower than I had ever been rated. I realized that, after having been promoted into a new position, I needed to learn a lot more. Determined to never again get a low rating, I learned as much as I possibly could by taking seminars, attending training, and reading books and articles; this quest for knowledge became the driving force behind my attaining the high rating I achieved for this year.

A turning point in your development of this skill/characteristic.
Example: As an undergrad, I took a course on argument and advocacy and learned a very important concept called Tooling Modeling, which is a logical way of thinking with three parts: claim, grounds, and warrant. The claim is your point; the grounds consists of your proof, evidence, or backing; and your warrant is your logical leap that connects the two. The theory is naturally a little more complicated than that, but this way of thinking has been my bible for rational thought and was the single most valuable lesson I learned in college. I use this way of thinking when I am presented with problems that require decisions. I structure a rational, logical argument for each likely outcome. I can therefore see where weaknesses exist, either in the grounds or the warrant. I conduct a bump-and-compare between arguments to see which are the strongest, and I go with the most durable argument. I also take a practical approach to decision making in that I try to find out best outcome for the least price or cost.

An example from your personal life (as opposed to career) of deploying this skill.
Example: I realized I had solid problem-solving skills during my freshmen year after I went to the soup kitchen in Parkersburg to serve food to the less fortunate. I felt that I needed to do something more, so I had an idea that when everybody moved out of the dorms at the end of a semester, instead of throwing nonperishable food away, students could put it in a box, and I would take it to the local food bank so it could feed the poor. I ended up gathering about six carloads of canned and dry food that would have been thrown away.

Patterns that have emerged in your development of this skill.
Example: I have learned that my role is to do work that makes a difference in people’s lives. For the first 20 years, I worked in television news, believing in the people’s right to know. For the past six years, I’ve been in education, helping teachers and their students. My ultimate goal is to be head of a department.

A strength or vulnerability from your past that led to developing this skill.
Example: I have always had a fascination for how machines work, and whenever my family and I went on vacation, I would always try and get the window-seat on the plane, if only to watch the flaps and air-brakes in action during takeoff and landing. As I continued my education, I felt a compulsion to use my degree in a people-oriented profession. So, while I love machines, I’d like to contribute my engineering skills in a company that affects peoples’ lives positively. I just like helping people.

More Story-framing Devices

A movie/story/book/event that exemplifies this skill for you.
A person/event in your life that taught you the importance of this skill.
A story of using this skill in overcoming one or more obstacles.
A Cinderella story of having been an underdog who used this skill to emerge triumphant.
A hero story in which you used this skill to do something unexpected to save the day.
A humorous and probably self-deprecating way you’ve used this skill.
A story about tasks and job functions related to this skill.
A timeline of how you developed and sharpened this skill.
Results you’ve achieved through using this skill.
Lessons you’ve learned while developing and using this skill.
Ways you’ve applied this skill in diverse situations.
A time when you felt passionate and alive in your work (and the skill that made the feeling possible).
One or more stories that you find yourself repeatedly telling about your work (identify the recurring skill[s] in these stories).
If you could tell just one story to explain what you do in your work, what would it be, and what skill would it involve)?

See more examples of skills stories in our sidebar, Stories that Illustrate Skills.

Final Thoughts
Consider, too, the needs of your audience as you choose stories to develop. In All Marketers Are Liars, Seth Godin advises that the worldview in the stories you tell must match the worldview of your audience — in this case, employers. Godin writes about story topics that always succeed with consumers. If we think of employers as consumers of the skills and experience that job-seekers offer, we can apply some of the same topics to story development: shortcuts you’ve taken to make work more efficient, ways you’ve generated revenue, how you’ve made the workplace safer, and even how you’ve made work more fun. Think creatively about the skills stories you tell.

Ways to Read Both Editions of Tell Me About Yourself, the Book about Using Storytelling in the Job Search and Career Advancement

2011-09-06T19:57:22Z

The most recent serialization of Tell Me About Yourself is now complete.

You can read the new, improved edition of Tell Me About Yourself by buying the book.

You can read the first edition of Tell Me About Yourself on this blog, as follows (Follow each chapter sequentially through the dates after the opening entries for each chapter):

Introduction: Why Use Story in the Job Search?

CHAPTER 1: Telling Stories about Change

CHAPTER 2: The Quintessential You Story

CHAPTER 3: How to Develop Career-Propelling Stories

CHAPTER 4: Networking as Storytelling

CHAPTER 5: Resumes that Tell a Story

CHAPTER 6: Cover Letters That Tell a Story

CHAPTER 7: Portfolios that Tell a Story

CHAPTER 8: Interviews That Tell a Story

CHAPTER 9: Personal Branding as Storytelling

CHAPTER 10: Propel Your Career Through On-the-Job Storytelling

Epilogue

You can read the first edition, page by page, here.

You can read it through the Facebook fan page for the book.

Workbook Companion to Tell Me About Yourself Coming Soon

2011-06-12T14:00:44Z

By the end of this summer, I will publish a workbook companion to my book Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling to Get Jobs and Propel Your Career. I plan to self-publish the volume and charge a nominal fee, tentatively $2.99.

In the time since Tell Me About Yourself came out in 2009, I’ve collected so much material I wish I had known to include or that I’d love to include in a new edition. The book has sold respectably, but I suspect not well enough for the publisher to be interested in a new edition.

And beyond new material, I want to specifically create a workbook that will help folks develop communication skills — through story — that they can apply to job search, career development, and the workplace. My plan is to fill the workbook with hands-on exercises.

I envision that business-communication and career-development teachers will find the workbook useful with their students, and coaches with their clients. Individuals, of course, will also benefit.

Anyone who read Tell Me About Yourself and wants to delve deeper into applying story to the job search, as well as gain more how-to interactive experience, should get a lot out of the workbook, but folks will not have needed to read Tell Me About Yourself to use the workbook.

Please email me if you’d like to be notified of the availability of Tell Me MORE About Yourself: A Workbook to Develop Better Job-Search Communication through Storytelling.

Allison Partners Recommends Tell Me About Yourself

2011-05-24T18:11:54Z

Rachel Brozenske of coaching firm Allison Partners recently reviewed Tell Me About Yourself.

Here’s an excerpt:

Whether or not your next interview begins when someone asks you these famous words, you’ll be well-served by Hansen’s approach to storytelling and the abundant examples she provides demonstrating how stories can help you with networking requests, resumes, cover letters, interviews, performance reviews, and more. Less a book for reading cover-to-cover and more a resource to work your way through, this guide explains why stories unlock doors and shows how to convert a list of experience and accomplishments into compelling narratives. It takes some effort, but I’ve seen this approach work for many, many clients.

Tim Tyrell-Smith Reviews Tell Me About Yourself and Lets Commenters Win Copies

2010-08-07T20:58:20Z

My new friend, Tim Tyrell-Smith of Tim’s Strategy has posted a review of Tell Me About Yourself and will gave away copies to selected commenters. Here’s an excerpt:
Kathy has an awesome book on storytelling called “Tell Me about Yourself: Storytelling To Get Jobs And Propel Your Career”. So I’ll tell you about Kathy’s book. Then I’ll tell you how you can win one of three copies she gave me. … If you are someone who freezes or cringes when asked a big, open-ended question like “tell me about yourself”, this book will be like a warm bath on a cold winter’s night. Kathy’s writing style is very comfortable. As you might guess from a storyteller. … Kathy’s book also provides many great samples to help you turn your experiences into engaging stories.

So if you’d like a chance to win a copy of Kathy’s book, here’s how to enter to win: leave a comment on this post. How? Share a story that you like to tell or a success in using a story to find a job or propel your career. You can also ask a question and I’ll see if I can get Kathy to answer a few.

Radio Interview Based on Tell Me About Yourself

2010-08-07T16:39:35Z

I don’t know how this recording sounds because I can’t bear listening to myself, but you might like to listen to this interview I did with Nan Russell of Work Matters on storytelling in the job search.

Review of Tell Me About Yourself by Nancy Miller

2010-08-06T17:08:03Z

Hansen, Katharine (2009)
Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling to Get Jobs and Propel Your Career
Indianapolis, IN: JIST Works
ISBN: 978-1-59357-6707
http://astoriedcareer.com/

Book Review by Nancy J. Miller

The title of this book caught my attention because the response to the question, “Tell me about yourself” is what employers want to know whether or not they ask the specific question. The employer wants to know who you are and what you add to their business. The author’s use of story telling as the basis of understanding the question behind the question is very perceptive. When asked to tell about yourself, or tell your story, you need to know exactly what stories to tell and how to tell them.

Story telling is an art that needs to be practiced to be effective. The author uses examples, case stories, and job search tools to present various methods for practicing story telling. By writing your story before you walk into an interview or evaluation, you will know what experiences inspired you and which ones left you less than happy. You can avoid discussing less than positive events and focus on stories that make you shine. The author clearly explains the need to write and understand your stories before the interview to build confidence, clarify important themes, and highlight your strengths. The book includes a wealth of information and resources for developing a resume, cover letter, interview strategies, and propelling your career.

Five things I learned:

Your story makes you unique and gives the interviewer something to like about you.
Storytelling builds trust because it provides an emotional investment and uses the right brain.
Telling a story to demonstrate a skill or experience may not work for every type of interview, but it always helps to write out your story and practice saying it out loud.
If you don’t have a good story for the job you are applying for, then it may not be the best fit for you.
Stories provide a picture of the information and form the basis of how we think, organize, and remember what was said.

I would recommend this book to anyone wanting to enhance their career, transition to a new career, develop effective job search skills, or assist clients in developing career management strategies.

Nancy J. Miller is a Credentialed Career Manager and LifeWork Coach with a Master’s degree in Career Counseling. For the past 10 years Nancy has been working with businesses, professionals, people in crisis and transition as well as students giving workshops, counseling, and coaching. She developed the “LifeWork Success Plan™” and “Color Your Style™” presentations to facilitate self-awareness, healthy lifestyle and career planning. Nancy is the director and founder of The Center for LifeWork Design. She can be reached at clwd@njmiller.info.

Epilogue: Let Your Career Story Unfold

2010-08-06T12:13:12Z

My goal in this book has been to examine career stories to discover how they can apply to individuals’ efforts to enter organizations and to interact with these organizations in a fruitful way upon gaining entry.

Through detailed descriptions and many sample stories, I hope you’ve discovered the promise of incorporating tales of career accomplishment, especially your successful interaction with organizational change, into powerful communication that influences hiring managers. The evidence is clear that storytelling then propels your career by also enabling you to promote yourself, lead and communicate change, and interact successfully with change in your new workplace.

I hope you’ve begun to compose stories about yourself as you’ve read the book. Now is the time to take charge of your story and let your career story unfold.

I invite readers to contact me to share stories and ask questions about storytelling and careers. E-mail me. Please also visit the parent blog of this blog, A Storied Career, and the Career Storytelling section of Quintessential Careers.

On-the-Job Storytelling Resources

2010-08-05T15:35:36Z

Brown, D. W. (2002). Organization Smarts. New York: AMACOM.

Callahan, S. (2006, April 30). How to use stories to size up a situation

Callahan, S., Rixon, A, & Schenk, M. (2005, December). Avoiding change management failure using business narrative

Clark, E. (2004. June 22). Storytelling for leaders (free registration at MarketingProfs site required).

Denning, S. (2001). The Springboard. Burlington, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann.

Denning, S. (2004). Squirrel Inc.: A Fable of Leadership through Storytelling. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

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

Denning, S. (2007). The Secret Language of Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Gargiulo, T. L. (2002). Making Stories: A Practical Guide for Organizational Leaders and Human Resource Specialists. Westport, CT: Quorum.

Gargiulo, T. L. (2005). The Strategic Use of Stories in Organizational Communication and Learning. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.

Gargiulo, T. L. (2006, January). Tell us a story<. American Executive

Gargiulo, T. L. (2006). Stories at Work. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Goman, C. K. (2005, Aug.). 12 questions for change communicators. Link&Learn eNewsletter

Goman, C. K. (2006, Jan. 9). What’s changed about change management? Communtelligence newsletter

Johnson, S. (2002). Who Moved My Cheese? New York: Putnam.

Kahan, S. (2004). Every professional has stories to tell.

Kotter, J. (2006, April 12). The Power of Stories. Forbes.

Maguire, J. (1998). The Power of Personal Storytelling. New York: Tarcher/Putnam.

McKay, H. (1998, June). Using story as strategy: Interview with David Barry, Ph.D.

Neuhauser, P. C. (1993). Corporate Legends & Lore: The Power of Storytelling as a Management Tool. Austin, TX: PCN Associates.

Peck, D. (2004, Aug. 23). Changing your story

Pink, D. (2006). A whole new mind: Why right-brainers will rule the future. New York: Riverhead Books.

Quintessential Careers: Real World Section. New graduates tell stories of the change from being a college student to being a worker and describe positives and negatives of their first jobs.

Richards, D. (2004). The Art of Winning Commitment: 10 Ways Leaders Can Engage Minds, Hearts, and Spirits. New York: Amacom.

Silverman, Lori. (2006). Wake Me When the Data Is Over. (2006). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

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

My Own Story of Change and My Career

2010-08-04T14:24:08Z

I’ll end this chapter with my own story of how change has affected my career:

Most of the organizations of which I’ve been a working member have grappled with change. The magazine publishing firm where I held my first corporate job was threatened with a movement to unionize workers. To show its benevolence, presumably in the hope that employees would shun the union effort, the company initiated the rather peculiar practice of delivering a piece of fruit to workers every afternoon. After the company began firing those who were most vocal about unionizing, the fruit no longer tasted as sweet. I then worked as an editor at a startup magazine, where the constant struggle to stay afloat was the catalyst for organizational change. Eventually the owners lost the struggle and sold the magazine. The new owners moved it to another city, leaving the staff without jobs. Next stop was an ad agency, where winning and losing accounts drove constant change.

I then joined the staff of the independent newspaper that served a large university community. There, a new batch of student staffers arrived with each academic year, and elections of top editors regularly changed the face of newsroom management. From there I joined another newspaper in a highly competitive metropolitan market. The newsroom was constantly abuzz over the ambitious plans of our chief rival paper and how these plans prodded change at our paper. Suddenly, the competitor bought our paper with plans to merge it with its own newspaper. I moved on to the executive editorship of a group of weekly papers and soon learned that the first thing the publisher wanted me to do was fire the two highest paid editors.

Leaving publishing to try public relations, I worked at a controversial reproductive-health organization that opened a new clinic, fought for continued government funding, and initiated testing for HIV and AIDS during my tenure. Next I became the speechwriter to an elected official, a position in which partisan politics spurred change. Nearly the last stop was a private university. Budget crises, enrollment challenges, and the drive for accreditation propelled change.

Overlapping my most recent jobs within organizations has been my effort to help people enter organizations, especially through written and spoken communication. As I have looked back at all the changing organizations I’ve been part of, I have to ask myself what I’ve learned. What have I discovered about driving, communicating, and coping with change that could help others? What could I have done differently to capitalize on organizational change? In what ways was I successful and proactive in encountering organizational change? What can my story and the telling of it communicate? How might I use my story to advance my career and guide others in employing story to advance their careers?

I then think about the career-management communication tools I have helped job-seekers prepare for a number of years. This book has been the realization of my contention that storytelling should be part of networking, resumes, cover letters, job interviews, portfolios, and personal branding. These story elements can influence hiring managers. Most important, continued storytelling helps advance your career once you are on the job.

Final Sample Story of Handling Change

2010-08-03T13:32:48Z

I used to not handle change very well. I’m a very routine person. Everything had to be routine for me. The second something got thrown off, it threw off my routine. At the theme park where I work, I was moved to a completely different location with a different environment. I was at a stadium location, with a 14-member staff and a very controlled, outlined, and specific setting. Then I was shifted over to the park’s rides area with a staff of 100 people. Everything was always changing. The volume was higher, and there were more people to deal with. I was forced to really have to change. I didn’t know how to change and hoped to just assimilate. That change really did throw off my whole routine. When management finally sat me down to explain that I had to change, they broke it down into a process that I was able to understand. I could mentally build the steps in the process - build a picture to make the adjustment. Otherwise, I would’ve never really adjusted. I probably wouldn’t even still be there if I hadn’t. All the changing roles I’ve had have helped me develop a different perspective on dealing with the change. And now you can change me on a whim at work. I can make the adjustment quickly and move forward without having to sit down and analyze how the change fits into my routine.

Reviews of Tell Me About Yourself

2010-08-02T20:58:11Z

The current serialization of Tell Me About Yourself is almost complete. Just discovered these reviews on Amazon and thought I would share them:

Review by Steve Krizman for Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling to Get Jobs and Propel Your Career

In her book, Tell Me About Yourself, Katharine Hansen provides actionable advice for incorporating storytelling in cover letters, resumes, job interviews, and conversations with the boss. As someone who is on the hiring end of the equation, I can vouch for the effectiveness of strategic storytelling (see my posts, What I look for in resumes and What I look for in cover letters).

Katharine, who writes my favorite blog on applied storytelling, interviewed job-seekers and studied reams of resumes while earning her doctorate. She supplies step-by-step story construction tips and illustrates her points with actual resumes and cover letters gathered in her research.

She clearly did an exhaustive literature search to gather a wide range of expert opinion on the subject. My only criticism is that Katharine could have synthesized the academic literature a bit more and taken a few risks by providing her own opinion.

Katharine puts the issue well for all of us, whether we are in the job market or are building our careers where we are: We should carefully nurture our own personal brand. And we know the best brands are those that evoke intrigue and emotion through the story that they tell.

Review by Miriam Salpeter for Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling to Get Jobs and Propel Your Career

“So, tell me about yourself?”

Is that not the most obvious interview question? The one that every job-seeker should anticipate and prepare to answer? Unfortunately, it may seem so obvious, many don’t spend the time they should focusing on how to answer it.

In fact, most aspects of the job search rely on being able to tell your own story:

Networking (the all important elevator pitch)

Your resume — connecting your accomplishments with the employer’s needs

Cover letter — another opportunity to sell your skills to a targeted employer

Portfolios — online opportunities to connect with people

Interviews — sealing the deal

On the job — to connect and advance

I highly recommend that job seekers take a look at Katharine Hansen’s … book, Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling to Get Jobs and Propel Your Career.

Her book is organized into several sections:

Part I — Career-propelling story basics

Part II — Using storytelling in your job search

Part III — Continuous storytelling

Katharine explains how stories can help you get a job by demonstrating your personality, helping to make you memorable and establishing trust. People who know how to tell good stories can communicate their value proposition, which is key for job seekers and careerists.

This book helps you with every aspect of telling your story — from figuring out what the story should be through tips for how to recall stories stored in your brain! (For example, give your stories names.) It is full of samples of stories and many, many ideas that are critically useful for job seekers and all professionals.

If you’re engaged in a job search — or maybe you should be — don’t miss this great resource!

Review by Tax Writer for Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling to Get Jobs and Propel Your Career

This book was surprisingly fun to read, mainly because it’s full of true employee stories, which are always interesting. I think the book would have been more appropriately titled if it had something — anything — in the title about interviewing. Really, this book is about how to interview successfully and make yourself really memorable.

The book also has numerous examples of successful resumes, cover letters, bios, and other correspondence to help “sell” yourself to a prospective employer.

Here’s my take:

The book is an excellent book on interviewing, and also how prospective employees should present/introduce themselves to employers
The book is more suited to people who are trying to obtain a management, supervisory, or white-collar job. The author already assumes that you know the basics, (like, don’t show up in jeans and flip-flops). She assumes that you have some skills and education, so this isn’t a book for someone trying to get a job waiting tables. It’s geared towards working professionals.
The book’s best points are the cover letter tips and examples, as well as the story examples, of which there are many. She also goes over how to handle a termination with dignity so you don’t burn any bridges.

Overall, I think this is an excellent guide, especially for the price, which is quite reasonable for the material provided and the page count. I felt that the title was a poor choice, and maybe even a little misleading, but I don’t feel that’s enough of a reason to give this book less than 5 stars, considering the quality of the material.