Is Your Resume Telling the Whole Story?
Why Storytelling Matters in Resume Writing
In the Spring of 2020, facing the same uncertainty as every other worker, I watched as my education and experience design work completely dried up due to the pandemic, not surprisingly as my work deals with food and food practices. Unfortunately, it turned out that my first large project of the year would be my last for the next 18 months.
Left without a way to earn money, I returned to resume writing to replace my loss of income. Before the pandemic, I had worked in Career Services in higher education from 2007 to 2015. After leaving higher education, I offered basic career support services, free workshops within my local community, affordable resume writing, and career coaching. But the work was uninspiring, and it was pretty apparent that people sought out these intro-level workshops and services because they had to and not because they wanted to make any significant changes in their lives or work.
While I needed to find a way to bring in income during the pandemic, I didn’t relish the idea of selling necessary but basic career services to individuals facing similar uncertainty. But I went ahead anyway and set up shop, offering resume writing, interview prep, and career coaching. I spent three months working with a handful of clients. Client outcomes were satisfactory. There were hits on resumes, and people landed interviews, but overall the career services work was nowhere near as satisfying as my work had been with my other business.
It wasn’t long until I hit a wall, with professional summaries of all things. For those who may not know, a professional summary is a concise narrative of your professional journey that appears at the top of your resume. Unfortunately, few people know how to capture themselves concisely and meaningfully. More often than not, they wind up describing themselves as generically as possible with some keyword optimization thrown in for good measure.
These statements, when read aloud, sound like they are describing a faceless character with buzzword jargon standing in for narrative. Writing a thoughtful professional summary is almost an art form. A well-written professional summary sets the stage for dynamic storytelling and an optimal flow of information.
Storytelling factors heavily in my professional work, and I consider it one of my throughlines. My background is in the performing arts. I’ve trained speakers (storytellers) for nonprofit agencies, and storytelling has appeared in both my career services work and in my food education business. So I wondered if I could apply a process of storytelling to professional summary writing.
I asked a client who struggled with including too much information in his professional materials (he came to me with a five-page resume) to try and capture his professional narrative as a story. He returned to me with a long-form journal entry that we then used as the foundational material for his professional summary.
The difference between his original professional summary and his final story-driven one was astonishing. He went from a generic statement about his skills and interest in tech to one where he seamlessly connected the dots between his early career in tech, his later career in manufacturing, and his desire to return to tech in a different capacity.
But it wasn’t just his professional summary that benefited from his story work. I also used his story to help him identify patterns and themes that appeared throughout his career. Then, we put these patterns and themes to use in other parts of his resume, including a keyword list of his hard professional skills and his bullet points. The result was a comprehensive and definitive narrative of this client.
His story provided the framework for which all other information could be applied, moving him from a generic tech professional with an unusual mid-career pivot to someone whose career was non-linear, dynamic, and highly relevant. My client used his story to land a role in his desired area (business intelligence) in a tech company that creates resource planning software for manufacturers.
After experiencing this profound shift in my process, I went all-in on story work. Between 2020 and 2021, I worked with 46 clients in various sectors at different stages of their careers using story work to help them achieve their goals. These goals ranged from seeking a new job to finding direction in their careers.
Out of the 46 clients, 38 came to me seeking new jobs, and eight wanted to use a story-work approach to reexamine their careers before making further decisions or movements. Of the 38 seeking jobs, 47% landed jobs within roughly three months, and 58% interviewed for positions within the same timeframe. Those who landed jobs found employment in their preferred sectors, many with salary increases ranging from 25% to 100%. Other satisfactory outcomes included clients using their stories to define their new roles and contributions and exploring new ways to apply their skills. Many clients reported going from no traction on their resumes and LinkedIn profiles to a marked increase of activity.
As a career coach, I found that I could use story work to achieve clarity with clients in ways that my previous approach didn’t allow. As a result, my conversations with clients were targeted and actionable. Story work even helped clients let go of old narratives that no longer served them, on their terms. I’ve mapped out the critical areas of assistance that story work can provide clients with resume writing and coaching. They are:
1. Identify and strengthen your narrative by connecting the larger dots and identifying key themes.
2. Challenge hidden narratives that no longer serve you in a supportive environment.
3. Explore areas of professional interest with a story-supported curiosity.
4. Shift from a performance-based application process to a more equitable conversation-driven approach.
5. Navigate an application process more smoothly, saving time, money, and other resources while confidently knowing your market value.
6. Tap into existing networks and related opportunities more effectively and with greater clarity.
If you are interested in incorporating your story into your professional materials, start with having a friend or colleague read your resume to see if they can see you in the copy or just a random professional. If it is the latter, try a simple mapping process of how you got from the earliest part of your career to now. Are there any patterns and themes you can highlight? What emerges as a story if you were to connect the dots?
You can also approach this as a freeform journaling activity. This approach can help you to avoid overly critical assessments and think more expansively about your story.
While clients from this beta group came to me with vastly different challenges and needs, Brio’s story work process has provided results that consistently exceed their expectations. In 2022, I am looking to further refine and systematize the process. My goal is to see how far story work can influence individuals and their relationship to work as well as the space of employment. I am especially interested to see how story work can be an alternative to AI-driven keyword optimization and possibly shift power imbalances between workers and employers.
Check back here for future articles to learn more about this process and how it can be used to challenge systems and support individuals in the space of work. For more information about Brio Career and story work, please feel free to visit: https://www.briocareer.com/
