Quintessential Careers Press:
The Quintessential Guide to Storytelling that Propels Careers
Introduction: Why Use Story in the Job Search?
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- Stories establish your identity and reveal your personality.
Stories satisfy the basic human need to be known. Clearly, being known
among employers is a major goal of job-seekers, and it is in large part
through resumes, cover letters, portfolios, and employment interviews that
employers get to know candidates. Job-seekers can gain the employer’s recognition
by integrating storytelling into these career-marketing communications.
In Training & Development magazine, Bonnie Durrance tells a tale that exemplifies the notion of revealing one’s personality through story. She describes an aspiring dancer exuding happiness and a positive attitude while working in a tollbooth. While many toll-takers might consider such a job soul deadening, the protagonist in Durrance’s story radiates joy because he turns on music and practices his true aspiration – dancing – in his tollbooth throughout his shift. “We can feel the story move us,” Durrance writes, “opening windows of possibilities, expanding our idea of work, and challenging our thoughts about jobs, dreams, and tollbooths.” It’s not difficult to picture the toll-taker/dancer interviewing for his next job and dazzling the interviewer with his upbeat take on making the best of a dull job.
- Stories help you know yourself and build confidence. Not only can telling stories enable others to know you better, but they can help you get to know yourself better. Developing and telling your stories can become the underpinning for self-authentication. As you see common threads and patterns emerging in your stories, you’ll understand more about yourself, your goals, your best career path, your ideal job – and this understanding can’t help but boost your confidence and improve your ability to sell yourself to an employer. An emerging movement in career counseling involves constructing career narratives that enable job-seekers to uncover meaning and connections. They become central characters in their own stories and plot their own futures.
- Stories make you memorable. Simmons and many other experts extol story as a way for others to remember people and their messages. Tom Washington, who devotes a full chapter of his 2000 interviewing book, Interview Power, to storytelling asserts that “in less than three minutes, you can tell a powerful story that will make interviewers remember you favorably for days, weeks, or even months after the interview.” Indeed, we remember people who tell stories because, as psychologists and neuroscientists tell us, stories form the basis of how we think, organize, and remember information.
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