Through Storytelling, He Became a Recruiter

Ask recruiters what led them to their career choice, and the typical response is “I want to help people.”  Admirable enough.

My guest on this episode of Unusual Attitudes became a recruiter for an entirely different reason: to tell stories. He’s Jonathan Berlan, the head of talent acquisition and internal mobility at UCB, the Belgium-based pharma giant. The best storytellers look to their own memories and life experiences to highlight their message.

For Berlan, that creative channel comes via writing restaurant reviews.

“People who read them don't want to know where to eat,” he said. “They want me to tell them the story of a meal I had there.”

It’s similar to recruiting. Candidates don’t want to only hear about a role. They want to know what makes the entire company tick.

That revelation struck a chord, because I grew up in the restaurant business. My father was a chef, and I owned a restaurant for a time. I don’t consider myself a professional cook, per se, but I know how to wield a pan and a spatula. I have a great appreciation for a dining experience, be it a $2 burrito or a $100 prime rib.

Watch our full conversation to learn more about what fuels this talent executive, listen to the episode, or continue reading for some quick takeaways.

Finding purpose in work

Of course, the best stories are highly personal, ones that no one else but the teller could share.

One of the big motivators for people such as Berlan to work in the pharmaceutical industry is to help others, as chronic pain is a serious global issue. UCB makes a range of drugs to treat severe diseases of the immune and central nervous systems such as epilepsy. It’s a massive company, with some 9,000 employees in 40 countries.

But how many of those employees are actually patients? We know for sure there’s at least one: Berlan.

One day in 2024, Berlan left the house and went to work feeling fine. By the time he returned home, it was an entirely different matter.

“Crippling pain”

“All of a sudden I would find myself having entire days and nights being wiped out by absolutely crippling, agonizing pain, the kind of pain that you don't understand where it comes from,” he said. “You cannot find any kind of medication that soothes it.”

The pain was the kind that “makes you question whether it’s worth living. That's how bad it is.”

Doctors didn’t know what was wrong, and still don’t. 

And yet, despite the excruciating pain, an opportunity was borne to reconnect with a different sense of purpose. Which, odd as it sounds, is a strange paradox of storytelling.

“Something terrible can happen, and at the same time, it is the most life-affirming experience you can have,” Berlan said. “This is real, and you have to accept it.”

Accept it he did. With no diagnosis (and thus, no cure), Berlan’s coping mechanism involved color-coded spreadsheets that allowed him to track the good days and bad days. He found comfort in the visualization exercise, allowing him to track the small moments in life that bring gratification.

“Similarly, you can have a really great achievement of work, or sometimes there are very difficult events, but if you start to plot them, you realize quite how rich life can be.”

The exercise is good for business leaders too. It can help bring some perspective that despite how busy we are, life is passing us by. We tend to miss those small moments — and I’m as guilty of it as anyone —- because we’re running from one meeting to the next. Sometimes, it isn’t until a debilitating health condition comes along that we are forced to prioritize what truly matters.

The power of sharing a story with people you lead is to help them better understand what motivates you. 

A great meal tinged with sadness

Whether we are conscious of it or not, we’re telling stories all the time. It could be getting buy-in from a colleague to support a work project or convincing someone to come work for a company. Stories create memories by attaching emotions to things that happen.

It’s a must-have skill to succeed in today’s business environment, but what makes a compelling story in a business context? 

In Berlan’s case, it could be as simple as a farewell meal for a retiring colleague. “It was a great meal, but it was also tinged with sadness, because this was the last time we were all getting together as a team,” he said.

In that posting, Berlan told the story of the group arriving at the restaurant full of joy and the hilarious waitress who good-naturedly needled the group. Hours later the meal ended and then everyone said their goodbyes.

“It's that contrast which yields a story,” he said.

Another incident that caused him to put pen to paper was the time he visited a gas station on a drive between Paris and Brussels. The service station had your typical fare — a place to fill up the tank and grab a bite to eat. But it was the area where it was located that told a compelling tale.

It was located in France’s Red Zone, which was so damaged by bombs during World War One that nothing could grow in the soil. “My review is a little bit comical and acerbic, but it ends with me saying ‘Look, if you ever go there, spare a thought for all the men for whom that was the last thing they ever saw.’ A great many men died there.”

There is a paradox, a contrast, between drivers filling up their tanks in the same spot where thousands gave their lives. If ever there is a secret to storytelling, Berlan said, it probably comes from that resolution of conflict between what you think you're experiencing and the reality of somebody else who's seeing the same thing and interpreting it very differently.

Business leaders can learn a thing or two from that. Compelling storytellers understand that a story needs conflict and contrast. For example, is there a market challenge that needs to be overcome? A change-averse industry such as Human Resources that needs a healthy dose of disruption by technology?

Anyone who communicates for a living (or reads to children at bedtime like I do with my sons) knows that a compelling story, told with emotion, wins over hearts and minds. In fact, there are as many ways to tell a story as there are stories to be told. If asked “what’s your story?” how will you respond?