If it’s Friday, it must be “Fast Company columnist supports storytelling resumes” day. At last that has been the case the last two Fridays, and both times Thomas Clifford told me about the articles.
Last week it was Nick Corcodilos supporting storytelling in or instead of resumes.
Today, it’s Dan Heath, half of the Heath brothers team that authored Made to Stick, which in part talks about how stories make ideas “sticky.”
In a Fast Company article this week, Heath actually says it’s impossible to make resumes — with their bulleted format — into storytelling communications that stick. Instead, Heath says to use your cover letter to make your resume stick by telling sticky stories in it:
Make it your goal, in the cover letter, to do two things: (1) Give headlines; and (2) Defend the headlines with stories. For instance, if you’re applying for a job in retail consulting, a headline might be: I’m the right guy because I have experience mining data to find useful insights. But don’t stop there. Support the claim by telling a story from one of your past clients: “In a recent engagement, my team worked for a major supermarket chain that had issued ‘loyalty cards’ to its customers. It worried that these loyalty cards were not improving profits — that they were simply giving away discounts to customers who would have shopped there anyway. They wanted us to study whether they should drop the discount cards. It was my job to explore the data in a systematic way — I’d love to discuss the process with you — and what I found, in short, is that discontinuing them would have been a $100 million disaster.”
I completely agree that cover letters lend themselves to storytelling far better than do resumes. But about a third of hiring decision-makers don’t read cover letters.
Thus, I am far from giving up on the idea of the storytelling resume.