My post last week on the lack of storytelling in job descriptions triggered some interesting email exchanges.

I especially appreciated Greg Morris who curates “What’s Your Story?” sharing a behind-the-scenes look at his son’s recent experiences in pursuing a job out of college. It turns out that Bank of America actually asks job candidates to talk for ten minutes on the topic of their choice not necessarily tied to finance or economics.

As Greg rightly put it, both “frightening and ingenious.”

Several other folks pointed out that Facebook simply suffers from the herd mentality, following the rest of Corporate America in crafting drab job descriptions.

There’s truth to this perspective but again, just because “every” company does it this way doesn’t make it right.

After spending a few hours raking job listings from a cross section of companies, a second trend emerged: Companies defined by an engineering mentality tend to treat all job descriptions with technical personnel in mind.

Even one of the great companies on the planet and the kings of Six Sigma, GE, falls into this trap.

A job description for director of digital publicity for the USA Network serves as exhibit A.

Check out the following phrases with particular attention on the verbs:

“Generate maximum exposure”

O.k., this isn’t horrible but look at the others.

“Service daily media requests”

Sounds like maid service in a Four Seasons training manual.

“Interface regularly with marketing”

Now the techno speak comes out. 

Perhaps engineers at mixers ask newly-made friends if they’d like to “interface” at a future date, but the rest of us view interface as a noun typically applied to a computer circuit that links one device with another.

If you want creative thinking and creative skills in a talent (both phrases in the GE job description), bring storytelling to the fore.

It’s easy to fall victim to the status quo.

After all, if virtually all companies handle something a certain way, then it must be right … right? 

Wrong.

The crafting of a job description shouldn’t be deadly dull even if companies have standardized on such an approach.

This got me thinking.

If there’s one large corporation that inserts some “life” into its job descriptions, it’s probably Facebook.

After all, their story is so compelling that Hollywood came calling. Plus, the platform is all about people, personalities and connecting with others, perfect fodder for storytelling.

Unfortunately, that’s not how the Facebook job descriptions play out.

I would characterize them as boilerplate and pedestrian – take your pick – lifted from the Job Descriptions 101 Manual that seems to dominate Corporate HR America. 

Here’s how the description for a corporate communications manager kicks off: 

Facebook seeks an experienced Corporate Communications Manager to support its global monetization efforts and programs. The successful candidate has strong experience in developing and executing high-profile communications initiatives, is an excellent writer, and has knowledge and interest in the concepts and technologies for online and interactive advertising. This is a full-time position based in our main office in Palo Alto, CA.  

Now there’s a phrase that sets the heart of a communication professional racing – 

“… to support its global monetization efforts and programs.” 

And what’s with the cold verb “seek”?

I’m guessing that 90+ percent of companies use the verb “seek” in their job descriptions which doesn’t exactly humanize the communication or differentiate the gig. From there, the Facebook job description erodes into the standard bullets that could be used by any XYZ company. 

Lest I come across as picking on Facebook, I know our own job descriptions would also benefit from a human touch. 

To see how a job description crafted the right way can trigger an emotional connection with candidates, check out the Duarte copy for a content developer starting with the initial graph: 

Are you equally visual and verbal? Do you jump to the whiteboard to show people what you’re saying? Do you pride yourself on being equal parts intellectual acrobat and lyrical heavy-lifter who can deliver idea after idea long past the point when everyone else has run dry? Are you a systems thinker who thrives on a deadline? Could you see yourself as a screenwriter? If you have experience in message development, positioning, and speech writing, this may be the position for you.

What a great phrase, “equal parts intellectual acrobat and lyrical heavy-lifter.”Duarte is striving to appeal to a certain personality type.

Then, the job description moves to the “About You,” but not with vanilla bullets. 

The wonderful narrative closes with: 

You can go “toe-to-toe” at the Director, VP and CXO level, offering fresh perspectives and insights. You are respected for making the complex simple and the invisible visible.

I might have to “borrow” a version of this. 

The point is, if you want to attract imaginative, smart and brave talent, your job descriptions should reflect these characteristics. 

We’re enthused to be hosting Nancy Duarte at one of our Lunch Bucket sessions on November 17. I’m curious to hear how her consultancy gauges the storytelling expertise of a candidate during the interviewing process.

You can see the Facebook and Duarte job descriptions in their entirety below.

We’ve discussed how storytelling techniques can open doors in the business and mainstream media. 

HP provides a good Exhibit A. By packaging a story on how the University of Minnesota took proceeds from licensing the “code” from Honeycrisp apples to help pay for a supercomputer, they secured interest from Ashlee Vance at The New York Times. 

With this in mind, we decided to analyze how The Wall Street Journal covers the semiconductor market. 

Specifically, we captured all articles that included the word “semiconductor” in The Wall Street Journal during the third quarter of this year and broke down the coverage by article type. You can see how this plays out in the pie chart below. 

We weren’t surprised that the vast majority of articles relate to stock price movement. 

What caught our attention is that today’s Journal leaves little room for semiconductor stories that don’t fit into the forecast category or company news. 

Drilling down another layer, we identified the semiconductor companies covered in the Q3 data pool. 

One would expect The Journal to pay considerable attention to Intel, the largest chip company in the world. 

Beyond Intel, the bulk of meaningful coverage gets devoted to DRAM companies. 

What’s the upshot? 

If you’re a semiconductor company with a good story not tied to hard news, you’re probably best served pursuing The Journal’s tech blog where stories such as Abu Dhabi’s Ambitions for Chip Manufacturing Hub appear.

A Korean publication has asked me to pen a column that offers an insider’s view of Silicon Valley.

No question, the business of technology has been globalized with innovation coming from all parts of the world. At the same time, I think it’s fair to say that Silicon Valley, this strip of land that stretches roughly 40 miles from San Jose to San Francisco, still represents the nexus of the technology industry.

My kick-off column reflects on my time in Silicon Valley. Here’s the English version.

I moved to Silicon Valley in 1981 two years out of college.

Have you heard the saying, “It’s better to be lucky than good”?

I was lucky in the sense that I moved to Silicon Valley because of the vibrant culture, the raw beauty of the area and a climate that rarely gets too hot or too cold. Little did I know that my new home was about to change forever when IBM released this product called the Personal Computer on August 12, 1981.

Naturally, I didn’t make much of the news at the time. My brother has described my technical acuity as “mechanically declined.” Needless to say, I wasn’t tracking the tech scene.

But that soon changed. 

A publication called the Corporate Times asked me to write articles from the transcripts of the editor-in-chief interviewing the movers and shakers of Silicon Valley. In a sense, these ghost writing assignments vicariously pulled me into the technology world. I didn’t know where this was going – keep in mind this is when Nolan Bushnell’s Pong was the avant-garde of video games – but I knew I wanted to be part of it.

My writing for the Corporate Times led to a job with a boutique PR agency focused on the tech industry. Here, I got my first taste of the big time, working on the Philips and Sony collaboration that produced CD-ROM technology. I know it sounds quaint today, but the idea of plopping roughly 600 megabytes of storage on a single plastic platter was mind-blowing back then.

Consider this for a moment. Bill Gates, THE Bill Gates, thought CD-ROM was so important that he personally created and promoted a conference to get the fledgling technology off the ground. Called the Microsoft CD-ROM Show (Mr. Gates didn’t exactly have a way with words), it showcased a range of companies and products including Microsoft’s very own Encarta, an encyclopedia on disc.

My involvement with Philips and Sony also offered up a lesson that has stayed with me to this day –

To understand situations, you need to probe below the surface.

Here’s what happened.

As you might imagine, there’s an enormous amount of documentation in a submarine, all of which resided in paper form in the mid 1980s. Philips had shown the U.S. Navy how it could transform all those binders of paper into searchable digital data on CD-ROM. After more than a year of demonstrations, the final step to closing the sale required signoff from the individual submarine commanders. Everyone thought this would be a fait accompli with the benefits so clear.

Instead the project hit a stalemate.

It turns out that the specific rank and compensation of each submarine commander was partly determined by how much the commander’s submarine weighed. Transferring the tons of paper documentation onto CD-ROM would reduce the weight of the submarine. In the eyes of the commanders, this “weight loss” was a negative, since it would reduce their prestige. Consequently, they wouldn’t sign off on the project.

You can’t make this stuff up.

After four years at the boutique PR company, I decided to strike out on my own and launched The Hoffman Agency in 1987.

Again, the adage “it’s better to be lucky than good” came to the fore. 

Shortly after starting the Agency, HP decided to place all of their mini computer documentation on CD-ROM – fortunately, HP did NOT have the submarine complex with weight – and wanted to hire a PR company with a deep understanding of CD-ROM technology.  We landed a major name on our client roster – HP – and were off and running.

Reflecting on the tech industry over the past 10-plus years, it’s been amazing to see the twists and turns in creating an industry that not only drives the global economy, but also impacts our daily lives.

For me, the symbol that the industry had moved from adolescence to the awkward teen years came from the Intel Pentium fiasco in 1994. This is when a mathematics professor publicized a fairly obscure flaw in its Pentium processor. Now, this in itself isn’t unusual. Bugs appear in software and hardware all the time.

What made this happenstance so noteworthy is how Intel reacted. Rather than come clean and offer a solution to right the ship, Intel told the marketplace they shouldn’t care about such a trivial issue. In classic engineering language, Intel explained with a certain amount of contempt that the typical user would find an error in the chip’s calculations once every 27,000 years, so let’s move on.

Not the right response.

The resulting firestorm brought Intel to its knees. Finally Andy Grove himself issued an apology, rolling out a program that allowed all Pentium users to replace the flawed chip at no charge. The fiasco showed that the world now perceived technology as part of their lives, not an esoteric backwater.

I think the dot-com debacle is an equally revealing symbol. 

What a crazy and weird period. We literally had the CEOs of startups parading through our offices on a daily basis with a same mandate: Get me to an IPO as soon as possible. It was ALL about money. No one was talking about building great companies or products that addressed customer pain points.

I think what often gets lost in this saga is what happened after the meltdown. The world, the tech industry and Silicon Valley kept going. Sure, the following couple of years were tough, but the spirit of innovation resurfaced and kept accelerating to where we are today.

That’s what I hope to achieve with this column.

To share Silicon Valley’s spirit of innovation with you from an insider’s viewpoint.