The Power of Storytelling

Into the Mind of Employers

A job application is a communication between you and representatives of your target company (e.g., recruiters, HR managers, hiring managers), with the purpose of convincing them that you:

  1. Possess all the technical and non-technical skills required to succeed in the role
  2. Are a good fit for the culture of their company
  3. Are their best (read: least risky) option out of all the other people that have applied for the same role.

This is a pretty tall order, so you will need to pull out all the tools in your communications toolkit to succeed.

When it comes to the job search, most people fail at the very first step of the communication process (i.e., the planning step) because they don’t understand the purpose of their communication nor their audience. So, with this in mind. Have you ever thought about what potential employers are thinking when they post a job advertisement and review submissions? Have you taken a step to think about their context, their motivations, or their challenges?

Most employers are trying to hire multiple roles at a time across different teams, and the pressures that they face are immense. Let’s think about this: What is on the mind of employers when they are hiring? What are they dealing with?

  1. Employers are risk-averse

    1. Recruitment is expensive, so employers are looking for people who are likely to succeed.
    2. Few employees are willing to take a bet on “potential”, they often want to see evidence of skills through previous demonstration of these skills.

  2. Employers are overwhelmed

    1. Your application is only one of hundreds or thousands of applications that they have to review. If you don’t stand out from the crowd, you don’t stand a chance.
    2. Make it easy for them to see that you have demonstrated the skills required to succeed in the role. Do not ask them to connect the dots for you.
    3. Small mistakes (e.g., poor grammar, typos) can get you screened out before someone even takes a close look at your application.
    4. Go to where they are. Attend events and build your network so that you can meet people connected to these employers. This could mean attending conferences, participating in hackathons, attending meet-ups, etc. Employers don’t have time to seek you out, so you must work to put yourself within their sphere of awareness.

Now that you have a little insight into the mind of the employer, it’s time to think about what this means for the way you should approach your job search. Throughout the hiring process, you have numerous opportunities to communiate with (risk-averse and overwhelmed) potential employers, and demonstrate that you are the candidate they are looking for. These communication channels include:

  • When you apply:
    • Your resume
    • Your cover letter
    • Your LinkedIn
    • Your portfolio or website
  • When you interview:
    • Your interview skills
    • Your performance on any recruitment tasks

Some candidates see the above channels as tedious things that they have to complete in order to land a job. Sort of like pointless hoops they have to jump through. This is why a lot of people are now using tools like ChatGPT to help them craft generic resumes and cover letters.

However, this is the wrong mindset. Each channel above is a valuable interaction with the employer and a powerful opportunity for you to tell your unique story. Most employers have an idea of the skills, mindsets, and experiences they are looking for when they post a job. The job description often includes details of the required and recommended skills, and an understanding of the company’s work culture and values can give you hints about the desired mindsets. To have a shot at landing a job, every interaction a representative of the company has with you needs to be a vote for the fact that you possess what they are looking for. You need to do the work to make it easy for them to see that you possess these skills. And you also need to do it in a way that is memorable and unique so that you stand out from the hundreds or thousands of other applicants. One of the most effective ways to do this is to use storytelling when crafting your resume, cover letter, etc.

The Power of Storytelling

One of the most powerful ways to use these channels to really connect with employers is through the medium of storytelling. Storytelling is a fundamental human activity that forms the basis of how we think, organize, and remember information. (source)

đź“– Read this NPR article on the power of storytelling to pursuade.

Then:

đź“– Read this Harvard Business Review article on landing a job with storytelling.

From the article, we learned 4 tips on how to use storytelling to help you land your next role:

Tip 1: Begin with your audience in mind.

Tip 2: Have a theme and promote it throughout your job hunt.

Tip 3: Give context to highlight your why.

Tip 4: End your stories with clearly stated resolutions.

Crafting a Career Narrative

One way of using storytelling effectively in your job search is to have a strong career narrative. There are numerous templates you can use to create your career narrative. In this section, you can see one approach in the video below and another approach in the linked article.

đź“ş Watch the following video for an introduction to career narratives.

đź“– Read the following article on how to craft a career story/narrative.

In the next sections, we will apply your career narrative orally (in introductions), in written form (e.g., your resume) and digitally (e.g., your LinkedIn and portfolio).