Roxanne Ravenel doesn’t really break any new ground in Building Career Success Stories: Why Storytelling is Essential to Finding Your Next Job, but she reinforces the importance of storytelling for responding to behavioral job-interview questions and provides an example of the class Challenge > Action > Results formula.
I’m delighted that Rusty Rueff, Glassdoor.com’s career and workplace expert, is talking about storytelling in the job search in his guest blog entry, How to Tell the ‘Story of You’ in A Job Interview: Part 1. But I’ve gotta quibble with this statement:
So, you have gotten the interview that you desired and you know that you are going to be asked once, twice, maybe five or six times, some question that is like, “so, tell me about you”. You then have five to seven minutes to tell your story.
As I wrote in the comments section of his blog entry: “Five to seven minutes to respond to the “tell me about yourself” question?!?! Oh my goodness, the interviewer will have nodded off long before you get to the end of even 5 minutes. Two minutes at the absolute most for your storied job-interview responses.”
But I love what Rueff says here:
Of the thousands of interviews I have conducted in my career, I can tell you that few of those stories stand out. And why don’t they? It’s because they are not told as stories. Instead, what I receive is a regurgitation of their resume and a data dump that lasts too long and is far from being interesting. As my mind wanders off to something else, I want so desperately to hear a story of intrigue.
I’m also looking forward to his next entry on the six plots that make up your personal career story.
Speaking of voices, I can’t bear to listen to my own and refuse to listen to my interviews and podcasts, but if you’d like to, here’s a link to a show I did in September with the aforementioned Roxanne Ravenel on her BlogTalkRadio show, The Savvy Jobseeker: Get Hired by Mastering the Fine Art of Storytelling