The Power of Storytelling in Your Career

Written by: Jack Chung

“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.” — Steve Jobs

Stories matter in business. Without stories, companies are just selling commodities: it’s just a cell phone rather than an iPhone 11 that takes beautiful photos of your precious memories, it’s just coffee rather than a Starbucks Venti Pumpkin Spice latte that warms you up on a crisp, fall day.

Storytelling doesn’t just matter for companies; they’re important for the people who want to work at these companies, too. When I was a hiring manager at Amazon, I knew immediately from technical assessments and a 5 second glance at the resume as to whether they could the job or not (also, studies show that 80% of jobs can be learned on the job). What I wanted to know was whether they had passion, whether they could communicate well, whether they could structure their thinking, whether they could give precise details of their accomplishments…essentially whether they could tell a good story.

When we think of storytelling, we often picture long, descriptive stories around a campfire. It can be difficult at first to determine how you translate campfire stories into professional settings and formats such as resumes, networking events, and interviews. Here are a couple of suggestions:

Think of your story as a beginning, middle, end. All good stories have a defined beginning, middle, end. The STAR method is the most common approach for behavioral interviews, and the STAR method follows a beginning (Situation, Task), middle (action), and end (result).

In the beginning of an interview, you want to spend 1–2 sentences describing the context of where you were working and what role you had. But most importantly, you want to spend 2–3 sentences describing the problem that you were assigned. You don’t have to embellish the problem, but you want to make your problem statement very clear and enticing for the listener. If you think about the best books you’ve read or movies you’ve watched, there was likely a very exciting problem the hero had to overcome.

Once you’ve established your problem, you want to focus on 3 main actions that you undertook to solve the problem. Particularly in interviews, you want to be very structured in describing your 3 main actions so that the interviewer doesn’t get lost following your steps. Finally, you want to end the story with a happy ending with specific results. Everyone loves a happy ending, so have an ending in which you succeed in your project, your boss is happy, or you’ve also learned valuable lessons.

Help your listener to visualize your story with precise details. Often times in mock interviews students will listlessly answer a behavioral question following the STAR method. My reply is, “That’s great that you told your story. But, it was so broad and the actions you described were so high-level and vague that if I were to re-tell the story to someone else, I don’t think I could.” You want to provide specific details (type of client you were working with, the number of people you were working with, the type of metrics you were analyzing, etc.) and quantifying numbers (revenue gained, hours or dollars saved, etc.).

This can be tricky because you don’t want to describe your story with overtly specific, insider jargon that the listener can’t understand, and you don’t want to ramble too long (usually 2 minutes per answer is a good length at an interview), so it takes some practice. But that’s why we are here as career coaches to help you with this in coaching sessions.

In the meantime, below is a quick example of how you can apply storytelling techniques in all aspects of your career, including your resume.

First, below are resume points of someone working at a pizza store:

Before

• Manned the cash register and was responsible for reconciling receipts. Also cleaned bathrooms.
• Trained new employees who joined the store
• Served as lead in evening shift

I think you’ll agree with me that based on these descriptions, the person’s work at the pizza store was just a job, and perhaps it shouldn’t even be on their resume.

However, let’s apply the same storytelling principles to the same job description:

After

• Manned cash register to serve 200+ customers daily with .5% error rate (best performer on team) and voluntarily cleaned bathrooms to be spotless 2 hours every day.
• Promoted in 6 months to training lead and trained 20 new employees to be able to serve customers within 2 days of training.
• Promoted to evening shift lead of 5 members in 12 months after winning Employee of the Month 2 times.

Wow! Is this even the same job?!? There’s a story here. The person started off by working diligently on simple tasks such as working the cash register and volunteering to do the job no one else wants to do, and she was able to work her way up the food chain of the pizza store (sorry for the terrible pun). I can picture her cleaning the toilets and training new employees with a smile, and I can also visualize the pride she has in leading her evening shift through the night. I want this person on my team!

But Jack, you might say, where’s the problem statement? Ah, that’s a great point. Sometimes, you won’t be able to incorporate all the storytelling elements in a particular career scenario. For example, if you’re at a career fair, you might just have 10 seconds to quickly talk about your background rather than launching a 2 minute story with a beginning, middle, and end. But you incorporate whatever storytelling elements you can, and then trust that you’ll be able to share more as you build the relationship with your contact.

Additionally, you might say, Jack, I don’t have such good examples of going the extra mile or achieving accomplishments in the work place like this pizza employee. Well, my first thought is that you probably have such achievements, and we may need to work together in a coaching session to brainstorm through some of them. And secondly, if you lack such accomplishments, it’s never too late to get started. If you’re a working student, you can start thinking about what you can accomplish at your work throughout this year, and if you’re not a working student, you can think about extra curriculars or side projects that you might want to tackle this year. The story will only be as good as the foundation it’s built upon, so let’s make this a year for which you can build those stories!