Strategy #31: Exploit The Superpower Of Narrative

As you start to create the content that forms the backbone of your interview presentation, you’d probably like to know how to how to elevate its quality in a way that’s guaranteed to grab the immediate attention of a hiring manager. One of the most powerful tools at your disposal is a core message that’s conveyed with a narrative structure that informs and guides the listener.

In this strategy I’m going to introduce you to the concept of story, as used in a commercial or professional setting. This is one of the superpowers that excellent communicators put to good use when they want to inform, persuade and influence other people. Story is rarely used in job hunting which gives you a significant first-move advantage, and I'll explain why.      

When it comes to most forms of communication, there’s something that differentiates those who succeed gloriously and those who fail miserably. If you need to influence other people in any way, success often comes down to creating a compelling story and telling it as well as possible. Good content and great delivery can have an enormous impact on anyone you interact with, and never more so than when you’re job hunting.

The word story is used by many people when they talk about the internal stories we tell ourselves and present to people around us. This concerns the way we construct a personal narrative which reflects our thinking and behaviours and, done well, guides the way we approach the worlds we inhabit. It’s a core part of positive psychology.   

Useful though this unquestionably is, it’s not what I’m thinking about here. Instead, I’m interested in the verbal aspects of story and not the attitudinal ones. This is about the very literal sorts of stories we tell each other so as to engage and entertain them. Well-told stories have the power to inform and persuade people, including a hiring decision maker of course, so I want you to understand the benefits of building a compelling personal story into your pitch and how this forms a critical part of your overall job search strategy.

To begin with, what sort of story am I referring to? Not the fairy-tale, once-upon-a-time sort of thing, for sure. I’m thinking about story as a way of conveying a compelling business message, a combination of hard facts and emotive narrative that addresses a specific work situation. It’s designed to engage, persuade and convince someone to take a particular decision. It’s a call to action. A story, as it operates in every workplace, and at the heart of any relevant business activity that rewards effective communication, then concentrates the listener’s mind on an outcome that you’re intent on fulfilling.

Story is the ultimate means to achieving an end. They tap into the emotional parts of our minds and balance the logical side of our thought processes and it’s this mix of emotion and reason that drives the decision making process of the person who’ll be hiring you. Combine demonstrable facts, that’s the reason part of the equation, with a compelling narrative, the bit that engages the emotions, and you have an extremely forceful apparatus at your disposal. Because it’s so powerful, telling a story should become central to your entire job-search strategy as you seek to convince someone to hire you.

Effective stories create a strong connection between the person telling the story and the person who’s listening to it. Crucially, stories are a call to action. They’re designed to get the listener to make a decision, to change their mind, to think differently, to be persuaded to do something as a consequence of hearing the story. The key point is that an action or decision might not otherwise have happened had the story not been told and heard. It could be that someone is persuaded to buy something that the storyteller is selling or, in our case, to employ the storyteller who’s sitting in front of them.

Stories work so well because they engage the emotions. We rarely choose to do something for entirely logical reasons, even though many of us like to think that we’re completely rational people who take carefully-considered decisions, entirely based on facts and reason. It’s comforting to imagine that we’re immune from emotional inducements to act in a particular way, but decisions don’t work that way. All of the evidence suggests that we’re strongly swayed by emotional and often irrational factors when we make choices, and that’s why stories are so powerful. Stories told by job hunters are no different in this regard.

So much for the general idea. Let’s get specific by examining the components of a story with a commercial narrative drive and discover what lies beneath the surface. What do business stories do and how do they operate? There are four core functions that they serve.

1. They create a contrast between choices. With so many options available to us wherever we look, in the consumer and commercial worlds in particular, the ability to differentiate between one possibility and another is essential. Stories help the seller and the buyer to do this extremely well. Why choose to buy one car over another? Why select one supermarket above the next? Why go on one holiday amongst all of the possibilities that are available to you? Stories help to guide you through numerous choices. Applying this idea to job hunting, you, the job-searcher, are only one of very many employment choices that a company potentially has available to it. Your story can create a decisive contrast between you and the next person more effectively than almost any other channel.   
2. Stories simplify complex messages. Many people do particularly complicated work, or their background and experience isn’t straight-forward in any way. If your work history resembles a twisted ball of string, the job you aspire to do is especially complex, or if you’re transferring a non-standard skillset from one industry to another, a carefully-constructed and simplified story is almost always the way to go.
3. They help people make sense of their decisions. Recruiters usually like to deceive themselves into believing that they take hiring decisions on an entirely rational basis. This is rarely the case, however much they might like to kid themselves into thinking otherwise. People seek validation for their choices despite the substantial emotional component of most decisions, including job interviewers.
4. The last of the storytelling purposes I’ll offer for now is maybe the best one of all. Stories hold the potential to rapidly change the way an audience thinks and feels. That’s because they combine each of the three previous ideas into a homogenous whole. Creating easily-understood contrast between choices, simplifying potentially-complex information and engaging powerful emotions to facilitate decision-making all come together to influence the way an interviewer thinks and behaves.

In summary, good business stories contrast, simplify and facilitate. These things are precisely what you want the person who has the power to hire you to be experiencing. You want them to see why you’re different from anyone else, to eliminate reservations about your value and, lastly, to prompt them to hire you as a direct consequence of the story you tell.

Are you persuaded about the power of using a story in your job search? If so, you’ll find complete and exhaustive instructions on how to create your own story in my full Job Search Masterclass. It’s a major part of my in-person training seminars and coaching programmes too. I hope to see you during one of these events soon!

Neil Grant, Vocation Master

If you have any comments, suggestions or questions about the issues I raise here, I invite you to contact me personally. Please get in touch via LinkedIn;

LinkedIn/VocationMaster