Tell a Story in Your Resume

“Oh, shoot me!” said my friend Ben, a hiring manager. “If I see one more resume from a Motivated Self-Starter, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“You can’t blame the job-seekers, Ben,” I said. “Resume-writers and articles tell them to use that junk in their resumes.”

“I need someone smart and nimble in this job,” continued Ben. “I need to know how these candidates think.These resumes all look alike. How can I tell which people are sharp and which ones aren’t?”

Ben makes a good point. Of course, Ben is part of the problem, not that he ever intended to be. He told the HR people in his company that he needs someone with six years of this and four years of that, so those were the requirements that ended up in Ben’s job ad. That’s the job ad that got all the job applicants to use their resume real estate to talk about their Excellent Communication Skills and other vague Skills and Competencies. Ben doesn’t need to know what a job-seeker thinks or his or her own Communication Skills. He needs to see those skills in action!

We can use our resume to show a hiring manager how we think and how we get things done. Consider this example of a typically boring resume bullet:

Took minutes at staff meeting and distributed them to department managers.

This example doesn’t tell us why the job-seeker took those minutes, whether anyone read the minutes or even whether they were good or bad minutes. It’s a horrible bullet, not only because it’s boring (and don’t you feel sorry for the poor person who had to take down and distribute all those minutes?) but also because there’s no power in it. We don’t exactly feel as though the person behind this bullet is a go-getter, or someone we’re dying to have on our team.

Let’s re-write that bullet to tell a bit more of the story:

Kept sixteen remote branch managers in the loop with HQ activities, earning the nickname “Radar O’Reilly” in the process

If you don’t know who Radar O’Reilly is, you can look it up and enhance your pop-culture knowledge. Let’s just say that Radar was a guy who knew how to keep a team well-equipped and well-informed. When we tell a mini-story in a resume bullet, we put a lot more information across. Now, as readers, we begin to see this job-seeker in action, getting on the phone or using email to keep those anxious branch managers aware of what the folks at headquarters were cooking up.

Let’s take another example. This time, we’ll tell a story about a summer job. Here’s the old resume entry for a summer internship at a Manhattan law firm:

Bonanno, Columbo, Gambino and Gotti, Attorneys at Law
New York, New York
Summer intern 2008

Answered phones Filed legal documents Performed administrative tasks for partners

From this sleep-inducing resume bullet, we get no sense whatsoever of the intern in action. Let’s try it again, this time with some storytelling in the mix:

Bonanno, Columbo, Gambino and Gotti, Attorneys at Law
New York, New York
Summer intern 2008

Bonanno, Columbo is a law firm specializing in maritime law. I got the job when I wrote to Mr. Gotti after hearing him speak at an on-campus event.

Overhauled the filing system to make it more intuitive and reduce photocopying burden Over the summer, I compiled a 2,000-item database of client contacts and a system for keeping it up to date Conducted a review of maritime law firms’ social media presence that enabled BCGG’s first social-media initiative (it’s now at the top of Google searches for maritime law)

The storytelling version of this young person’s resume gives us about ten times more information than the plain-vanilla, non-storytelling version did. Here’s what we’ve learned, that we didn’t know before:
We learn that the intern got his job through pluck, reaching out to an on-campus speaker he liked (they always tell kids to do that sort of thing, but how many of them do it?). We also get a hint that the kid is a good writer. We learn what the law firm does. That context is important, because we want to be able to see the kid at work in our mind’s eye as we imagine what he’d be like working in our environment. We learn that the kid has enough ‘jump in and do it’ ability to take on that gnarly filing-system overhaul project. We learn that the intern also built an important database for the firm, and that he thought about it enough to realize that the database wouldn’t help anybody unless someone kept it updated. Talking about a specific project is so much more compelling than saying “worked on a bunch of projects.” We learn that the intern got online and researched the competition’s social media standing. Even better, we learn that that project had a great outcome — the law firm jumped on the social media bandwagon as a result of it. When we can, we always want to share a happy ending!

Use some storytelling in your resume the next time you apply for a job. Hiring managers want to know more about you than the usual yada-yada – so put your stories out there!


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