A resume is not enough to convince an employer to hire you. They need more tangible results that can woow them and gain confidence in you. A personal Narrative is the best hack to do this.

A personal statement is a brief personal summary about you that are not included in your recommendation letters or resume. In short, it’s a broad scope which reflects what you’ve written on your resume and includes your character and motivations.

Before we go further, let this sink into you; do not include what you’ve written on your CV on your personal statement.

What should I include then?

A good question!

A personal statement depicts your ambitions, beliefs and anything else that can help in selling yourself to the reader. You can include anything as long as it’s able to meet the above a statement. However, there are specific guidelines that can give you an upper hand;

• Narratives/short stories.
• An intriguing introduction to catch your reader’s attention.
• The main reason you’re interested in the specialty.
• How your inclusion in the team will be an added advantage.
• The skills and qualities that you profess that will help the team. You let your prowess do the talking.

The Narratives

This is what we are discussing today. A narrative is simply a story about you. The story should be thematic and conveys what happened.

Why is a narrative important?

• The narrative reflects your experiences in your career and demonstrates your skills in a more practical way. It acts as evidence that you’ve truly participated on your specialty once or more
• You can introduce some humor in an interesting way creating an environment that’ll make your reader feel at ease in reading your statement. You can easily win him/her here.
• A narrative quickly captures your reader’s attention hence making him/her engrossed to your statement to the last line
• The narrative reduces monotony of the statement. This helps to create imagery in your readers mind making him/he glued to your statement.

Narrating the Story

This is where you come with guns blazing. Ensure that you narrative are conservative to take care of your image. When narrating, consider these points

• The story should be an actual experience you’ve had. Don’t take your friend’s story and paste it into your statement. This is in bad faith and can ruin your chances of getting included in your specialty.
• The narrative must be in line with what you’ve applied to. It must mutually connect to your specialty. Don’t give a story of your first experience in marketing while the interview is about accounting.
• The story should be peculiar. This will let your personality shine and give you an edge over other applicants. You should not give common stories that are obvious and boring. Let it be perfect and to the point.
• Your narrative should NOT, and I repeat NOT show any offense. Your ego should not take the better part of you and try to be too clever or artistic. The simple misunderstanding can cause dire consequences.
• The narrative should reflect the fact that you’ve grown professionally. For example, you can tell a story where you faced a challenge and you were able to solve it in the most professional way.  This will convince your readers and make it interesting.

What Stories should I narrate?

This is where many applicants go wrong. You take the wrong choice of story and then end up ruining the whole statement. Cautiously, choose the stories to narrate.

• ONLY tell the stories that can be easily understood. Don’t narrate a puzzle expecting your readers to unravel. No one is going to take their time to try and figure out what your story entails, and sadly, what it means. Be specific and to the point.
• The narrative should not depict too much humor.

“But you said it’s ok to introduce humor. “

This is what you’re probably thinking. Yeah, I admit I said it but don’t get me wrong. Don’t spill the whole of it. The narrative should correctly measure and balance all the content you want to pass across. Too much humor would not be of good faith.

• The story should be personal. Speak as if you are talking with the reader. The reader should feel what is happening and should be connected to all the expressions surrounding the narrative.

What does it mean to narrate a Story?

 A story means a lot when writing a personal statement. I’ll give you some facts to prove this statement.

• The story is the first, “occasion” where you tell the interviewer what you can do and shows them that you are a perfect match for your specialty. It creates a positive thought to your reader that you’re able and have what it takes.
• A perfectly narrated story with skills and prowess with the all the guidelines followed easily influences your reader to give you a try.
• The narrative in a way reflects your ambitions and objective as an individual. You can go ahead to mention them in order to back up what your goal is to the organization.

Bottom line

A narrative should appear on all personal statements. It’s the building block to the statement and has much importance.

Use the simple steps to come up with a compelling narrative that will spice up your personal statement.