Job-Seekers, Prepare Your Stories!

Storytelling is such an important part of a job search that it should be a central focus for anyone on the job hunt trail. If you think about it, your job search boils down to finding ways to tell your story to people who might need your help. Without stories, there's no job search.

When we have been taught how to job-hunt the traditional way, most of us have been taught not to tell stories but rather to list our skills and certifications and years of experience and other things that really have almost nothing to do with answering the question "Can you do this job?"

Stories cover a tremendous amount of ground for a job-seeker. When you tell a story about what you've done before, you show a hiring manager that you understand his or her move. You show them that you've already played in a similar movie, and you tell them how you rocked it at a past job. As a job-seeker, you've got to first recall and claim your stories, then practice telling them in writing and in conversation.

You tell your story in your resume. You tell it in a different way in your job interviews. Even if you insist on applying for jobs through those horrible a

your story.

If you are a glutton for punishment or you just like the feeling of beating your head against the wall, you can apply for jobs online. I recommend that you don't, but I know that Mother Nature is a better teacher than I am.

Once you get sick of lobbing resumes into the void and hearing nothing back, you may shift your energy away from Black Hole recruiting sites and start job-hunting the Human Workplace way.

Until then, you can tell a story in your online job application. When you get to the part of the application form that asks you to explain what you did on your last job, here's how you'll do it. The field on the entry form says "Tasks and Duties," but that's just bad process design.

You can ignore the instruction to write about your tasks and duties. Anybody could figure out the tasks and duties from your job title. If the programmers who had built those automated applicant tracking systems fifteen or twenty years had spent three seconds thinking about it, they would have realized that the worst question we could ask a job-seeker is "What were your tasks and duties in your last job?"

Who cares what the job description was? Anybody in the job would have performed the same tasks and duties. We should be asking "What did you accomplish in that job?" instead!

That's okay. You can tell your story in the online job application even through the form didn't ask you for a story. When you tell your story instead of listing boring tasks and duties, you'll come alive on the page for the reader. This works

EMPLOYER: Acme Explosives

JOB TITLE: Customer Support Represenative

LIST YOUR TASKS AND DUTIES: I got the job straight out of Community College and completed my BA while I worked at Acme . I took care of our biggest customers and got certified as a Trainer in the Customer Service with a Human Voice program. After that I trained all the new employees.

There's a story! If you are thinking "but the application form didn't ask me to tell a story -- will I get in trouble for answering the question a different way?" you are in desperate need of detoxification from the Godzilla fear machine. You think I'm kidding! I'm serious. A lot of job-seekers are afraid of their own shadow.

When you finally give up on the Black Hole recruiting sites and start to reach out to your hiring managers directly, you'll tell a quick and powerful Dragon-Slaying Story in each Pain Letter -- just one story per letter. Here's an example of a Dragon-Slaying Story in a Pain Letter:

When I was at Angry Chocolates just before the acquisition by Nestle, we were under the gun to launch our Sweet Tips edible nail polish line in time for Chocoholic Expo 2012. We got the product and won Best New Product at the show, picking up $650K in pre-launch orders there.

Bada bing! Stories tell us how you came, saw and conquered. A story in your Human-Voiced Resume or on a job interview is a million times more powerful than another sleep-inducing list of Skills and Qualifications.

For years we've been taught to talk about our Skills, and now we are waking up to see that Skills are garbage - unless we're talking about hardware and software, in which case you need to list everything someone on your resume so that people know which tools you've used.

Everybody can list tools on their resume, but when it comes to telling us what you know how to do and how you've proved it, stories are the only way to go.

Here are short Dragon-Slaying Stories used as bullets on a Human-Voiced Resume. Here the job-seeker, Meg, is sharing three little stories from her time in the Marketing department at Angry Chocolates:

• For the launch of our Sweet Tips nail polish line, I built a training video for our sales reps and one for our customers, with a call to action embedded in it. We got $200K in orders directly through the video.
• With our web team I created a ten-step drip marketing campaign to bring our retailers up the curve on selling our higher-priced products. We increased sales for our premium Very Angry line 15% to $1.5M.
• In my boss's absence, I led the weekly Sales Coordination meetings that kept our customers' shelves stocked and kept customer feedback coming into our product development team.

Your resume will end up as a wonderful tapestry of stories, and no one else will have a resume just like yours. Your stories will make you pop off the page. Your story is your brand!

The last place you'll tell stories as a job-seeker is in job interviews. You don't have to wait until somebody asks you a story-type question like "Tell me about a time when you...." You can answer almost any question with a story.

Here's an example:

MANAGER: So Paul, have you worked with Appliantology software much?

YOU: A little bit. We had a copy of it in our supply closet when I started at the job and I was curious, so I installed it on my machine and got into it. We used Appliantology to design our dental-floss picking machines, which use a particular type of zircon-encrusted tweezer circuit that we had to design ourselves.

MANAGER: Cool.

Of all the stuff that I tell job-seekers when I speak to groups or on the radio or in webinars, the thing that freaks them out the most is the fact that you can spend an hour with a hiring manager and he or she can completely forget who you are. This is insanely common.

You won't be shocked to hear that if a manager forgets you, they're not going to hire you.

I was an HR person for millennia. I'd say to a manager "Can I get your feedback form from your interview with Mike?" and they'd say "You mean Tony?"

I'd say, "No, Mike Smith, tall guy, raises dachshunds?" They'd say "I didn't talk to anyone about dogs. Dangit, I can't remember Mike. Tall guy, you say?"

"Yes, super tall guy," I'd say. "You don't remember him? He just got back from vacation - does that ring a bell?"

"No offense, but you're short," the manager would say. "Everyone is tall to you."

"Mike Smith is at least six foot four - isn't that tall?" I protested.

"Can't place the guy," the manager would say. What would you do if you were the manager - or if you were me?

Poor Mike Smith is at home waiting to hear about his interview and the manager who interviewed literally cannot bring Mike Smith to mind. You have to make an impression. You have to tell stories!

Here are 25 Story Prompts to Get You Started! (click on the link)