The Rise of the Storyteller
Everyone's hiring storytellers. Almost nobody has a story.
Everyone wants a “storyteller” now.
Not a content marketer. Not a copywriter. A *storyteller*.
LinkedIn job postings using the term have doubled in the past year. Over 50,000 marketing positions now include it. Executive mentions of “storytelling” on earnings calls jumped from 147 in 2015 to 469 in 2025. Microsoft, Google, OpenAI — they’re all hiring “chief storytellers” and paying upwards of $274,000 for the privilege.
Here’s my question: storytellers to tell *what*, exactly?
Most Companies Don’t Have a Story Worth Telling
They have a product. They have features. They have a mission statement someone workshopped in an executive offsite three years ago. But a story? Something that actually means something to anyone outside the building?
Not so much.
The storyteller gold rush isn’t about companies suddenly discovering the power of narrative (right? right). It’s about companies hoping they can hire their way out of being boring.
It doesn’t really work like that.
What “Hire a Storyteller” Usually Means
When a company posts a storyteller role, what they’re often really saying is:
”We don’t have a clear point of view, and we’re hoping someone can create one for us.” A storyteller can’t invent your company’s reason for existing. If leadership can’t articulate why you matter, no amount of narrative polish will fix that.
”Our content isn’t performing, and we think better writing is the answer.” Sometimes it is. More often, the problem is that you’re saying the same thing as everyone else in your category, just with different fonts.
”We saw that other companies are doing this and we don’t want to be left behind.” The best reason to hire anyone, obviously.
*To be clear: storytelling skills are genuinely valuable. Story-driven content improves recall by 22 times. Brands with compelling narratives see 20-30% higher customer loyalty. In a world where 70% of web content is now AI-generated slop, authentic human voice matters more than ever. A great storyteller can absolutely help a brand find its voice, shape its narrative, and connect with customers in ways that resonate.
But storytelling is a multiplier, not a magic wand. The company has to be willing to meet the halfway — to have a perspective, to hold an opinion, to say something that might not land with everyone. You can’t show up in public discourse in a way that reverberates, that speaks to real emotion (and not just rage), if there’s no substance underneath. A storyteller can shape and amplify but very rarely can they manufacture meaning from nothing.
What Actually Makes a Story Worth Telling
The companies with stories worth telling share a few things:
There must be a genuine point of view. Not a positioning statement. An actual opinion about how things should be. Something that might piss some people off — I’d just recommend pissing them off for the right reasons. If everyone agrees with your “brand story,” it’s not a story. It’s wallpaper.
The stakes have to actually matter. Stories require tension. What are you fighting against? What’s at risk? “We want to help businesses succeed” isn’t a story. “We believe the way enterprises buy software is fundamentally broken and we’re going to fix it” — that’s the beginning of one.
The actions have to match the words. The fastest way to kill a brand story is to tell one thing and do another (ahem). Customers aren’t stupid. They know when you’re lying and can smell the gap between your narrative and your reality from a mile away.
The story needs to exist independent of marketing. The best brand stories aren’t invented by marketing departments or your branding agency. They’re part of the PMF, they’re discovered, they’re already happening in how the company operates, treats customers, makes decisions. Marketing’s job is to find that story and tell it well — not to fabricate one from scratch (see point #1 and start again).
The Uncomfortable Truth
The storyteller gold rush may create a lot of jobs. Many of them will be frustrating as hell.
Because talented writers and narrative strategists will join companies expecting to tell meaningful stories, only to discover there’s no story there to tell. They’ll be asked to spin straw into gold, to make undifferentiated products sound differentiated, to manufacture authenticity where none exists.
Some will succeed in spite of this — they’ll dig until they find something real, or they’ll push the company to actually develop a point of view worth sharing.
Most will burn out, churn out, or learn to produce the same forgettable content as everyone else, just with better prose.
If you’re a storyteller considering one of these roles, do your due diligence. Make sure there is product-market fit. Ask hard questions in the interview. Does this company actually have something to say? Do the leaders have a genuine point of view? Is there substance here, or just a desire for the appearance of substance?
And if you’re a company hiring storytellers, maybe start by asking whether you have a story worth telling in the first place. If yes, are you willing to invest in them?
