I am often beyond surprised by which of my blog posts gets attention and resonates with readers.
My Saturday post about the Earth’s stories got some mini-buzz.
But who would ever think of connecting geology with one’s career story? Apparently my colleague Jacqui Barrett-Poindexter. She has written a brilliant post comparing the story-inaccessibility I’ve experienced with my geology interest to the way job-seekers’ career stories are sometimes obscured.
“Tasked chiefly with telling stories on behalf of my job-seeking clients,” Jacqui writes, “I am hired to narrate career stories that are both accessible and interesting to their hiring decision-maker visitors.”
She then offers story-development tips and processes “to help boost accessibility to your career story (Be sure to read her post to get the full elaboration on these great tips):
- Launch your resume writing process with thoughtful idea conception: conceive your next career target.
- The next challenge is to pick through the multiplicity of shiny stories you’ve exposed to find those that will appeal to your target reader.
- Deeply reflect on your areas of value that you offer your intended company.
- These snapshots must be arranged to mean something to your audience, resonating with their needs for increased revenues and profits, more customers or whatever it is they are feeling deficient in or business areas in which they wish to expand.
- Finally, value your career unearthing process for the interview enriching preparation it provides.
This idea of targeting job and employer with the stories you choose for your resume is so important. I get asked all the time to critique resumes. The first thing I always ask for is a sample job posting typifying the kind of job the job-seeker is targeting. I can’t effectively critique a resume unless I can see how sharply it focuses on a given job and/or employer. I’m in the process of developing a list of indispensable career books for the 15th anniversary of A Storied Career’s parent, Quintessential Careers. Mentioned in the brilliant Guerrilla Marketing For Job Hunters 3.0 is the No. 1 job-seeker mistake: Lack of focus in the job search. Sometimes a job-seeker will respond to my request for a job posting by saying he or she isn’t sure what he or she wants to do. Your resume will be of very limited value if employers can’t see, as Jacqui puts it, the thoughtful conceptualization of your career target.
And Jacqui is right on the money in her assertion that one set of accomplishment stories won’t work for every job and employer; you need to pick a set specific to each target. My new workbook offers numerous exercises aimed at developing job-specific and employer-specific stories.
I love Jacqui’s final point about how valuable story development is as interview preparation. I ask clients to complete a grueling Accomplishments Worksheet that asks 18 questions for each past job (in the workbook, I ask for these accomplishments in story form). Many balk at all that work and wonder why they hired a resume writer. The smart ones, though, complete the worksheet diligently and then sing its praises for how well it helped them prep for interviews. (In the meantime, their work has enabled me to create a resume that is many times more effective than it would have been without their accomplishment stories.)