Resumo

In the speakers’ words, LinkedIn platform is a powerful professional branding tool, in which users should make their profiles more modern and attractive, creating digital personas that attract recruiters’ attention, thus increasing their chances in recruitment and selection processes. The core argument was that LinkedIn profiles should not be limited to a list of personal data, roles and positions already held, technical skills, and professional references. Rather, in order to become more attractive in the market’s eyes, they should narrate all this information through storytelling.

The studies offer few descriptions and analyses of the activity itself; in fact, they “tend to analyze stories in their own terms and pay less attention to how they are located and implicated in the ‘daily life of the members’” (Whittle et al., 2009, p. 427). In order to fill this gap, this study focuses on the content and efficacy of stories in a specific life situation of the subjects: the search for professional (re)allocation. The research question is: how much does the market really perceive and value the storytelling narrative in candidates’ digital CVs?

Therefore, storytelling is a way of giving voice to the identity of an individual or organization (Pullen, 2009) and to adopt this format is to confirm that narrating a story is something that is culturally legitimized as a social question (Boje, 1995). Storytelling is ultimately the interaction of major narratives (epistemic and empirical) with living stories; they are antenarrative processes, which occur before the narrative coherence and bets on the future that are connected (Boje, 2014).

, we conducted an empirical study divided into two phases. In the first, we researched how common the use of storytelling is in the profiles available on LinkedIn, using the data mining technique and the Python language. In the second, we conducted a quasi-experiment with managers responsible for the recruitment and selection process in various market segments, in order to evaluate profiles with and without storytelling and, in the case of the former, whether they valued them.

Through the Python programming language, we wrote a code that identified 7,763,585 profiles in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, of which 5987 use some kind of storytelling. The analysis of this last group suggested the existence of three types of profile on LinkedIn: pragmatic, chronological, and romanticized. The interviews with 23 managers were subjected to discourse analysis and suggested the intensive use of LinkedIn as an instrument for market prospecting, recruitment, and selection by these professionals; and the appreciation of the practice of storytelling in the market.

The rhetoric of biased narratives – both in the profiles and in the speech of the interviewees – reflected the discursive constitution of society, which does not emanate from a free set of ideas in people’s heads, but rather from a social practice firmly rooted in concrete material social structures, orientated toward them. At the end of our research, we wondered how intentional the practice of storytelling actually is.

Boje, D. (2014). Storytelling in Organizations: Managing in the Quantum Age. London: Routledge. Boje, D. (1995). Stories of the Storytelling Organization: A Postmodern Analysis of Disney as “Tamara-Land”. Academy of Management Journal, 38(4), p. 997-1035, 1995. Knight, E.; & Tsoukas, H. (2020). When fiction trumps truth: What “post-truth” and “alternative facts” mean for management studies. Organizational Studies, ahead of print.