How Your Story Can Transform Your Job Search, with Levi Gaytan
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Your story is your most powerful job search tool, yet most candidates fail to use it effectively. According to Find Your Dream Job guest Levi Gaytan, job seekers without personal narratives appear formulaic and forgettable to hiring managers. Stories create connections, showing employers why you’re applying and how your past experience relates to their needs. Levi’s approach uses two frameworks: SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) and VRIO (value, rarity, imitability, organization). He says effective stories follow a simple formula: before, action, result, and then why it matters to the employer. Every experience contains transferable skills – parenting demonstrates leadership, driving for Uber shows resourcefulness. Rather than weak language like “supported,” use strong action words like “led” and “directed.” Success comes from authentic self-reflection and conducting informational interviews to truly understand what employers need, rather than simply matching resume buzzwords to job descriptions.
About Our Guest:
Levi Gaytan is an HR leader, speaker, and community builder.
Resources in This Episode:
Transcript
Find Your Dream Job, Episode 515:
How Your Story Can Transform Your Job Search, with Levi Gaytan
Airdate: August 20, 2025
Mac Prichard:
This is Find Your Dream Job, the podcast that helps you get hired, have the career you want, and make a difference in life.
I’m your host, Mac Prichard. I’m also the founder of Mac’s List. It’s a job board in the Pacific Northwest that helps you find a fulfilling career.
Every Wednesday, I talk to a different expert about the tools you need to get the work you want.
You need the right skills and credentials to apply for a position, but to stand out from your competitors, you have to show what makes you unique.
Levi Gaytan is here to talk about how your story can transform your job search.
He’s an HR leader, speaker, and community builder.
Levi is passionate about helping you thrive at work and in your career.
He joins us from Vancouver, Washington.
Well, Levi, we’re talking today about how your story can transform your job search. What exactly do you have in mind when you talk about someone’s story?
Levi Gaytan:
Yeah, when you’re talking about someone’s story, so you know, I think what this is all about is that your story is really your most powerful job search tool. This is something that gives you clarity, it gives you confidence, and even connection, and helps others kind of see where you fit, helps yourself see where you fit as well.
Mac Prichard:
Some listeners might be thinking, “Well, why do I need to tell my story? I’ve got the right degree or the license, or I’ve worked for this employer and gotten this experience.” Why do employers care about your story when they’re making hiring decisions?
Levi Gaytan:
Well, I think the reason why your story matters, specifically when it comes to your job searching, is that it helps to target better-fit jobs. Organizing yourself around your story is what also boosts the quality of your resume as well as your cover letters, and kind of builds a foundation for even interview answers, right?
Your story is what connects the dots between your past and where you’re headed. And so this is something that creates alignment. Hiring managers are going to get why you’re applying.
It’s also going to show impact, so you’re not just listing tasks, but you’re actually proving value here. And then it also makes it memorable. Stories stick, and resumes have a tendency to blur.
Mac Prichard:
So it brings focus and discipline to your search, as well as helps you improve your applications and responses in interviews.
How can, and you touched on this a moment ago, Levi, how does telling your story help you stand out from your competitors?
Because everybody has sat down at LinkedIn or one of the job boards and seen their X number of applications. How can your story make you distinguish yourself from the other applicants?
Levi Gaytan:
I think it shows intent, and it shows purpose. It also shows clarity, and it kind of helps bring that to the hiring manager. And I think what’s unique about that is that a lot of other job seekers might not be telling their story in a way that is coming from their heart, but as more in alignment with what the job description is showing.
And that might be a really important aspect of it, but there’s more to that than just aligning yourself with the job description. The hiring manager has a job description. They already know what it is they’re seeking, but they want to hear from you what it is that you do, that you bring value.
And I think taking that moment to be unique and express yourself is what I think stands out and makes the difference between you and just the average job seeker.
Mac Prichard:
I want to talk about how to define your story. Before we get there, what happens, Levi, in your experience as an HR leader, if a candidate doesn’t organize and share a story when applying for a job?
Levi Gaytan:
If a candidate doesn’t really organize and share their story, I think the lines get blurred. And to me, it almost looks like a formulaic response or automatic response. I don’t get the uniqueness, and I don’t really see the individual that I’m reviewing when I’m looking at something like this.
I can tell the difference between somebody using those buzzwords and keywords that just align with the resume versus somebody that says, “Here’s my experience and here’s what I’ve done and how it translates into the role that I’ve done.” And so that is what I see as a hiring manager myself.
Mac Prichard:
What stops candidates from telling their stories? What do you see as common barriers?
Levi Gaytan:
Common barriers. That’s going to be things like, I would say it comes from things like fear of judgment, thinking maybe that their story is boring, or worrying that it doesn’t really match a perfect path.
A lot of things that also might stop people from sharing their story come from cultural conditioning, as well as around humility. This can look like internalized dialogue or maybe even feelings that sound like, “I don’t want to brag,” or “I don’t have the right experience,” or maybe “My path is too scattered and no one will care about my story anyway.”
Right. So those are kind of the barriers that I see, that helped, I would say that, that facilitate people through not sharing their stories, that fear, that doubt, that unclear direction that holds people back. But those are common and those are also fixable.
Mac Prichard:
They are common, and I know you’ve got solutions. One barrier I didn’t hear you bring up was that sometimes I’ve met candidates who think, “Well, I don’t really have a story to tell.” What would you say to a listener who might be thinking that?
Levi Gaytan:
I would say that it’s important to probably examine a little bit deeper. We’ve all woken up every day, and we’ve all lived our lives every single day, and we’ve all been faced with a number of challenges every single day.
Whether or not we feel it directly relates to a job, I would argue that it actually does. Let’s take somebody, for example, who maybe is just coming out of college. They have no degree. Maybe they are an Uber driver, right? And maybe they’ve done some tutoring and maybe they’ve done some social media gigs, right?
There are a lot of different places that we come from in our lives that can tell stories of things like resourcefulness or hustle. Right. And I think that it’s important to really look at everything and see what that translates into. What is the theme here, and what are those dots that connect to your everyday life experiences into the type of thing that you’re wanting to do?
Mac Prichard:
What mistakes do you see applicants make when telling their professional stories?
Levi Gaytan:
The mistakes that I would see when an applicant is telling their professional story, I think, is not giving themselves enough credit. I think sometimes it’s important to be able to not be afraid to toot your own horn. I wouldn’t use words like kind of, or I wouldn’t use words like supported, but I would use words like led and I would use words like lead and boost. I mean, there’s a lot of, you know, directed.
There are a lot of things that you do that I think we just don’t give ourselves enough credit for. And I think that when you don’t give yourself enough credit for doing something, that kind of has a tendency to translate into the words that you’re putting together.
Mac Prichard:
Well, I want to talk about how to tell your story effectively. And you’ve got some great tips for how to do that, as well as the frameworks you touched on at the start of our segment.
Stay with us when we come back. We’ll continue our conversation with Levi Gaytan about how your story can transform your job search.
We’re back in the Mac’s List studio. I’m talking with Levi Gaytan. He’s an HR leader, speaker, and community builder.
Levi is passionate about helping you thrive at work and in your career. He joins us from Vancouver, Washington.
Levi, before the break, we were talking about how your story can transform your job search. And we talked about why story matters, what stops applicants from telling their stories, and some mistakes that candidates might make along the way.
And let’s talk about in this second segment how to tell your story, and especially your tips for how to tell it well.
At the start of our first segment, you shared two frameworks that you can use to define your story. Tell us briefly about those frameworks and how a listener can apply them.
Levi Gaytan:
Yeah, so the two frameworks on that would be the SWOT analysis and the VRIO analysis. These are two business frameworks that an organization might use to move a product or itself into one direction or another, or to make impactful business decisions.
And this is something that is commonly referred to in that course. And so when you think about yourself as that organization, if you’re breaking out into the job market, you yourself are the product.
And so you want to be able to take some time to examine yourself internally and be able to do some examination of what’s happening externally. This is where the SWOT analysis and the VRIO analysis come in really handy. If we define what a SWOT analysis is, it stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Strengths would answer questions like, what energizes you? And weaknesses would answer questions like, what’s hard for you? Where do you lose your energy? And then what’s trending in the industry? Where do your strengths align? Right? Think about those things.
Opportunities are really key to understanding yourself also and understanding the direction that you’re headed. The threats are looking at what’s changing fast, right? What skills might you need to develop to get where you’re going, and what kind of stands against you in your pursuit? Answering those questions within this framework starts that process of internal examination as well as external examination.
Mac Prichard:
Why do you take your answers and apply them to a story you tell about yourself that will interest employers?
Levi Gaytan:
Well, I think what employers want to know is what are your strengths and oftentimes we get asked, “What do you feel is a weakness?” perhaps in the course of an interview. And I think that just being able to align this out into the framework that it is, then translates you into being able to speak to it.
If you were to say, for example, one of the strengths is my ability to lead a team and forge connections, and you have that written down in your SWOT, then that’s the start of your story. My ability to lead a team and build connections is what strengthens my role here; the opportunities that come from that have been X, Y, and Z, right?
I have been asked to lead another team, or I have opened myself up to now leading other teams and forging other connections with other people. And so being able to just kind of follow the quadrant is what kind of helps to bring all those things together. Value, rarity, imitability, and organization are also part of what builds this story, too.
You know, when we look at that VRIO framework, we want to answer those four questions. The first one being value. What do you do that creates value for others, which also stands to be a strength? Think about the rarity here. What is unique about your approach, maybe your background, or even the results of the work that you’ve done in the past? What is it that is special about you and that you feel that nobody else can really copy, right?
And that takes you to inimitability as well, which is the “I’ and the real framework. What part of your story is something that can’t be easily copied, which thus translates into a value for many organizations to say, hey, this person carries this skill or this person carries this trait or quality about them that is something that I need to be able to build the connections that I’m building here as an organization.
Now, being organized is asking yourself, are you showcasing this value in your resume or within LinkedIn or interviews? And so really how to do it is just by asking yourself those questions, right? What am I great at? What have I done as my best work? When have I done that? What do I value in work or culture, and what trends or roles match those skills? And how do I most importantly take that information by answering those questions? So then write a paragraph about it.
Mac Prichard:
So let’s talk more about that because you have these two frameworks. You’re listening at home. You’ve written down the acronyms. You’ve created three or four responses to each part of the two frameworks. And now you’re sitting down to create your story. You suggested a moment ago writing a paragraph.
Say more about this. How do you take the analysis and turn it into a story that you then can apply to your application materials, your interviews, and your networking meetings?
Levi Gaytan:
So think about this. A strong story is something that is simple, is relevant, and it’s tailored to the role. And there’s a formula that you can use that actually helps you build this together and put all these things together. So the formula would be first, I would say before, action, result, and then why it matters.
Talk a little bit about maybe a challenge that you faced, and that’s the before. The action would be what you did in response to that challenge. The result might be what’s changed as a result of the actions that you did or your response to that challenge, and then why it matters. What does that mean now? Right.
And so using plain language, not necessarily buzzwords, is going to be helpful in this thing that you’re doing here. And then also connecting your story to what the employer needs, I think, is important because a story is great, but we want the employer to be able to see the purpose here.
The purpose of me telling you this is because this is exactly what you’re looking for, and this is how those dots connect. That’s the ability to end with aspiration by showing where you’re headed.
Mac Prichard:
So you’ve done the analysis using the two frameworks that you outlined at the start of this segment. You’ve written down your answers and turned them into a story. And then you’ve used your third framework to create stories that you can tell in response to specific needs of employers.
How do you continue to organize and apply this material well? I want to dig in a little more about your point about understanding the needs of employers.
How can you be clear about what employers need? What have you seen work well for candidates when they’re trying to take this analysis and this story and make sure that it aligns with employers’ needs?
Levi Gaytan:
Being able to take the information from the analysis and then apply it to what the employer needs. Well, I think it’s important to take a look at the job description and make sure that we have a full understanding of that because that’s going to definitely lay it out.
A lot of employers are, I think, pretty clear when it comes to the essential skills and then, you know, knowledge, skills, and abilities that they’re looking for. Maybe the experience that’s required for the job.
But taking your life experience and being able to turn that around and say, yeah, this employer is looking for somebody who can lead a team to greater success in customer service, for example. Well, you might be somebody who is a parent, right? Who might be, maybe you’ve taken care of kids for a long time, and now you’re trying to break into a job that’s going to be leading a team of customer service people that is to greater success.
Well, you have kids and your experience as a parent to be able to draw from that experience. Right. And so that would be among the list of things like strengths. What’s worked well, if you were a parent in this example, when it comes to leading your kids to successes, to doing things that they’ve been wanting to do or to being able to impart wisdom to those kids?
And so translating that over to the need of the employer, which is to be able to lead a team while your kids are kind of like that team. Right. And so this is what’s worked well for me. And the theme here is not necessarily treats and toys, but it could be, what is it that worked well, being able to captivate, right? Being able to catch attention, being able to motivate.
Those are the words that the employers are looking for to be able to say, yep, this is somebody who has had experience motivating and captivating attention, and being able to forge connections and being able to lead with purpose, right, into what it is that I’m specifically looking for.
Mac Prichard:
You mentioned looking at job postings to understand employers’ needs. What else can you do beyond looking at what might be available online to understand the problems that employers try to solve so that you can craft a story that shows you’re the person who can make that hiring manager’s life easier?
Levi Gaytan:
Don’t hesitate to reach out. Informational interviews are great. If there is something that you want to do and a role that you want to work in, I say, don’t be afraid to ask. Talk to the people who are on the ground, right?
And you can do that through LinkedIn and by reaching out to some of the employees at the employer, or you can reach out to the employer themselves, even the hiring manager, and say, “Hey, this is a role that I am particularly interested in. And it’s something that I’m curious to know what is your biggest challenge” right?
When it comes to filling jobs in this role or even with where you are as a business and what prompted the need for you to be looking, you know, for somebody to carry out this type of work.
Just by simply asking those questions is going to show interest. And for myself, being a hiring manager, I’m interested in those people who reach out to me and say, “Hey, I’m curious. I want to know,” right?
And taking that extra action, I think, is what sets you apart.
Mac Prichard:
You’ve hired so many people over the years, Levi. In your experience, how many candidates do this work? The self-examination, the organization of the story, the understanding of an employer’s problem, and creating a story that shows that they’re the person who can solve these problems.
Levi Gaytan:
To be honest, I don’t see too many. I do see some, and you can tell the difference between somebody who has taken the time to do that work and then be able to express themselves in a clear and direct way versus somebody who’s just kind of shotgunning a resume that could apply to just about anything.
And so I would say it’s a rarity in itself for people to organize themselves around their story, but I think that a lot of people have found that organizing yourself around your story is a very helpful thing, right?
Your story makes your job search smarter and stronger, and even just more human in that process. And what helps you stand out is not necessarily by being flashy, but again, by being clear and connected to where you’re going and being real about that.
Mac Prichard:
Well, it’s been a terrific conversation. Now tell us what’s next for you?
Levi Gaytan:
Well, I’m committed to the role of HR. So continuing to do my work in leadership here, especially expanding my role with PHRMA and taking that experience and doing more with it, learning from it. That’s something that I want to do.
Also, I teach line dance over at Stomptown in Portland, Oregon, which is an LGBTQ+-centric line dancing and country dancing community. That’s been a lot of fun and so I enjoyed the opportunity to forge connections and you know, bring about inspiration by helping people learn to do something that they’ve never done before, something that’s different and that’s unique and show them that they have the power to be able to do those things.
I also want to continue working with my role as a DJ on ShadyPinesRadio.com through Portland, Oregon, as well. It’s an online radio station.
And I really enjoy doing the work that I do there by playing music from the different genres and different eras or decades and then dropping fun facts about those things as well as a way of educating people around that.
Mac Prichard:
Terrific. know that listeners can connect with you on LinkedIn. And when you do reach out to Levi, please mention that you heard him on Find Your Dream Job.
And you mentioned an acronym a moment ago, PHRMA, and that stands for Portland Human Resources Management Association. Great organization. And I’m glad you’re involved there.
Now, Levi, given all the great advice you’ve shared today, what’s the one thing you want a listener to remember about how your story can transform your job search?
Levi Gaytan:
The one thing I want listeners to remember about how your story can translate your job search or translate into your job search is that this is an opportunity for you to be able to really hone in on the direction that you’re headed and for you to really be able to communicate who you are in this space, right? This is an opportunity to be able to say, “Hey, I’m here and this is everything about me and this is what I bring to you.”
Right. And this is why I feel confident in bringing this to you and how that translates into creating success. So being real is going to be the most important thing, and ask yourself, “Does this sound like me?” And if you’re not sure if this sounds like you ask a trusted friend, ask somebody who you value their responses and or trust their responses and say, “Hey, does this sound like me?” and get that validation. And I think that’s a really important part of this, too.
Mac Prichard:
Next week, our guest will be Alondra Canizal Hsu
She’s a career strategist and the founder of Soluna Career Consulting.
Alondra helps BIPOC, first-generation, and immigrant professionals navigate the job search with confidence, clarity, and cultural awareness.
Looking for a new job can be hard on your feelings.
You may experience exhilaration, disappointment, excitement, and rejection in one day alone.
Join us next Wednesday when Alondra Canizal Hsu and I talk about navigating the emotional labor of a job search.
Until next time, thanks for letting us help you find your dream job.
This show is produced by Mac’s List.
Susan Thornton-Hough schedules our guests and writes our newsletter. Lisa Kislingbury Anderson manages our social media and creates our transcripts.
Our sound engineer and editor is Matt Fiorillo. And our music is by Freddy Trujillo.
This is Mac Prichard. See you next week.
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