Why Your Résumé Should Tell A Story

Imagine if you knew the secret formula for transfixing the reader of your resume, weaving a spellbinding narrative that was so compelling and relevant to the reader that it propelled you ahead of your competition and virtually guaranteed you an interview for the jobs you most desire.

That is the power that storytelling can have, when applied strategically to your resume.

Now let’s be clear. I’m not suggesting weaving a fictional story in your resume. Rather, I’m suggesting bringing yourself alive on paper by telling your authentic, branded story in a way that creates a connection with your reader, makes you memorable and intriguing, adds credibility to your accomplishments, and evokes a desire in your reader to meet you and learn more.

The best professional resume writers are gifted storytellers who skillfully unveil and tell the stories of their job-seeking clients in ways that are relevant to employers. The resumes that we write help employers find the deeper meaning behind the words, guiding them to make connections between your past accomplishments, their current needs and problems, and your future potential.

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How can you transform your resume in this way? While every resume is and should be as unique as the individual, here are some guidelines that you can follow:

Be Yourself

Know your audience and stay focused. Looking for a job isn’t about reinventing yourself to be appealing to every single employer. Many times I have clients who resist this in fear of “pigeonholing” themselves. But it is okay to pigeonhole yourself if it means drawing in opportunities that are appealing while repelling those that are not.

Be clear about what you want and what you don’t want: the type and level of job, the industry or industries that interest you, the size of the company and company culture, among any other factors that are important to you. Now put yourself in the mind of that “ideal” employers. What are their most pressing concerns, problems, and challenges? Keep these in mind as your write.

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Transfix Your Audience

Remember and incorporate the five most important elements of a good story:

1. Characters: The most obvious character in your resume story is you, but other characters may be your boss, your co-workers, customers, or employees. 

2. Setting: The setting for your story may be the company or organization you worked for, or it could also be a division, department, a region or territory, even a team you worked on.

3. Plot: The plot for your story is the storyline that wraps it all together. It will have a clear beginning, middle, and end. There are a number of ways you can structure this, but most often the plot of a resume story follows one of four patterns.

Monster Slaying – All the odds are stacked against you, but you pulled out all the stops, solved the problem, and achieved great things regardless of the obstacles.

The Quest – This is the story of a journey, often involving working together with others to achieve some major goal while overcoming a series of challenges along the way.

Rags to Riches – Beginning at the bottom, this is a story of growth and success.

Rebirth – Common in turnaround stories, this is a story of transformation from a problematic situation to one that is the completely revitalized and changed.

(In the above excerpt of the profile section of a resume, you can clearly identify the "plot" of the story/resume in the subheading and can tell that this is a story of "The Quest" from the text)

4. Conflict: An accomplishment alone has very little meaning without context. Understanding the conflict or adversity overcome provides your accomplishment with the context that makes it meaningful and credible. The conflict in the story is an essential element but the one most frequently left out of resumes. What is the conflict? Most frequently it will relate to:

A challenge or situation related to an organization – perhaps the one you work in or a team you work on, but it could also relate to your competitors

A challenge or problem related to a thing – for example, outdated computer equipment that needs updating

A challenge related to a situation – such as the need to reverse declining sales or the need to redesign inefficient processes

A challenge or situation related to a person – perhaps you replaced an underperforming predecessor 

(It is easy to identify the conflicts in the stories told in the resume excerpt above. The first company was a mature company that needed revitalization and fresh ideas. The second needed reorganization and restructuring to transform a rather chaotic situation and support rapid expansion.)

5. Resolution: What were the results that you produced? What did you increase? Improve? Enhance? Reduce? Strengthen? Whenever possible, you should quantify your accomplishments. Employers like numbers. Think in terms of your individual results, but also think in terms of overall strategic impact. How did all of these results added together solve the big picture problem and overcome the conflict?

(As illustrated by the above resume excerpt, quantified results complete the story and serve as proof of your potential to deliver value and a strong return on the employer's investment in you.)

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Organize Your Stories

Think about and organize your stories by employer or job. For each, ask yourself:

1.      Context: what is the overall challenge or situation?

2.      Actions: what did you do to meet those challenges?

3.      Results: what positive things happened as a result of your actions?

4.      Strategic impact: what was the big picture impact?

This is called the CARS method. The goal is to tell your story as concisely as possible. Get to the point using plain, simple, and direct language free of clichés and fancy prose. Resume stories do not need to be long. They need to be relevant and engaging. As a broad rule of thumb, try to tell each story with a short introductory paragraph of five lines or less, and no more than five accomplishment bullet points each no longer than two or three lines at most.

(As shown in the above resume excerpt, sometimes it is possible to take the CARS technique quite literally.)

Identify the Theme

Now go back and identify the underlying themes in your stories. You will almost certainly recognize some common threads between the plot stories. These common threads inform your overall value proposition and provide you with the material you need to craft a compelling summary section to begin your resume. Your summary section provides an intriguing hint and high-level overview of what is to come in the rest of the resume. It helps to frame the conversation, reveal your character, and set the tone and focus for the rest of the resume. 

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 Make the Connection

Without a story, your resume is just a bland recitation of power verbs and disconnected facts on a piece of paper. The best resumes are self-marketing documents, and storytelling in your resume doesn’t just have the benefit of humanizing you beyond lists of jobs and education on a piece of paper, it does it in a way that creates trust and connects your value offering back to the employers’ needs.

On the flip side of the boring, “just the facts ma’am” resume, are overly wordy, lofty, and flagrantly self-promoting resumes. At their worst, these resumes can actually harm your credibility and create distrust. Nobody likes a braggart, and a resume filled with accomplishments but no context for those accomplishments is just that.

Remember, your resume isn’t about you. It isn’t about how great you are. It isn’t about bragging and it isn’t about your ego. Storytelling can help you transform a resume that may otherwise be perceived as such by removing the emphasis on self-promotion to engage the reader with a credible, engaging narrative that shows the reader exactly how the skills you bring to the table can be of service to them.

The bottom line: Your resume is about the employer and the employer’s needs. Storytelling is the secret formula that will help you make this connection.

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Michelle Dumas is an award-winning executive resume writer and career marketing consultant. She can be contacted at www.resumeconsultant.expert or you may learn more about her professional writing services at www.distinctiveweb.com and www.executiveresumewriting.services This article is an expansion of a piece originally published on Forbes.