This week I had the honor of presenting in front of a group of talented and ambitious interns ranging in areas from Data Science, Regulatory Affairs, Computational Biology, Software Engineering, Construction Management, and more. They asked for information on how you craft your story for your resume and social media and also interviewing techniques. We had a lot of fun discussing and I thought I’d take the opportunity to share a web-adapted version of the content here. So here we go!

When you are getting your story across in the real world, the sequence is:

Getting noticed > Getting your story across > Having crafted your story

So, then how do you get started? Well, let’s flip it around:

Crafting your story > Getting your story across > Getting noticed

Crafting your story

The first step to crafting your story is understanding which parts of the story your professional network and employers will want to know about. What are you looking for in your next opportunity? Begin to understand what those employers look for. For those in the biomanufacturing and companies innovating with cutting edge technologies, there will be some degree of commonality. It might help to know some common themes we see from hiring managers at Zymergen:

Searching other company websites, you can find more themes like below:

So great, you’ve picked out a bunch of attributes that employers will want to know about you. Now it’s time to put together the stories.

To begin, it is important to know employers are typically using Behavioral-Style Interviewing techniques to understand your story. There’s a ton of stuff out there on Behavioral-Style Interviewing techniques so a quick search in your favorite search engine will get you all the information you’ll need there, so we won’t go in-depth here. But to summarize:

Behavioral-Style Interviewing = Assessing a candidate’s abilities by asking them to describe past behavior.

This is based on the idea that it’s impossible to predict future human behavior, and therefore someone’s success in a future job. However, we can do our best by looking at their past behaviors as a foresight of what we can expect.

So your job, is to put together a bunch of STARs for all the things an employer might want.

So if you know what a company looks for, what kinds of things might they want to know about you? Here are some examples related to the success factors we find at Zymergen:

Getting your story across and getting noticed

Once you know the stories you want to tell, then you can use that to package it up and and as a foundation to things like:

I can give you the Recruiter’s perspective on how you can show up better in search results. It’s important to know how Recruiters use LinkedIn. Without going into all the dirty details (because we don’t want to give ALL of our secrets away!), here are some of the things that help get you into the filters most used by Recruiters:

You resume and LinkedIn profile should hint at some of your best STARs but don’t give away the farm! Include just enough detail to incite curiosity and for a prospective employer to want to know more. An abbreviated summary of STR from the STAR acronym is a good starting place. I personally love seeing resumes that have these and invite a conversation.

Crafting your story is a work that is always in progress and that you will always be adding to, updating and refining.

So hopefully this helps get you started. Best of luck out there you smart, ambitious awesome interns. We hope to see you back at Zymergen in the future.

Signing off,

Ruba Asmussen
Head of Recruiting
Zymergen #wemaketomorrow