Interviews, LinkedIn, personal branding, resumes, and the professional
voice. Everything you need to communicate with clarity and confidence —
before, during, and after the interview room.
After coaching candidates through English-language interviews for years, the same handful of mistakes show up again and again, and they are rarely about English ability itself. They are about habits that work fine in Korean interview contexts and quietly work against candidates in English ones. Answering With Modesty When Directness Is Expected Deflecting credit toward…
I have written before about how ATS filters explain resume rejections in general terms. This is the more specific version, for the growing number of Korea-based candidates writing an English resume for the first time and discovering that the formatting rules they learned for Korean-market resumes do not transfer. The ATS Does Not Read the…
Of everything students ask me before an interview, the question I hear most is not about content. It is some version of: what if I know the answer but cannot find the words fast enough in English? That fear is real, and most 영어 면접 준비 (English interview prep) advice ignores it completely, jumping straight…
I have written before about why the STAR method is lying to you… how the format alone cannot save a forgettable answer. That argument still holds. But I hear from readers constantly that they understand the critique and still cannot produce a strong answer under pressure. So this is the companion piece: not why STAR…
Almost every professional I coach through a job change in Korea asks some version of the same question at the start: am I doing this in the right order? The anxiety is not usually about whether to leave. It is about the sequence… what to do first, what to keep quiet, and when the risk…
Every semester, a student sits in my office with a Western cover letter template open on one screen and a job posting from a Korean company on the other, trying to force one into the shape of the other. It does not work. And the reason it does not work is that they are not…
Seoul has a specific networking event circuit that most foreign professionals discover within their first few months in the city. The international chambers of commerce, the startup community events in Gangnam and Mapo, the alumni association gatherings. The food is usually good. The name tags are usually unreadable. And the conversations follow a remarkably consistent…
The Korean job interview is not primarily an assessment of skills. It is an assessment of character, fit, and the kind of person you will be inside a hierarchical organisation. Here is what Korean interviewers are actually evaluating.
Every team has someone who consumes more than they contribute and has learned to make that invisible. Here is why this happens, what it costs, and how to address it without making it personal.
Most professionals treat the elevator pitch as a performance. It is a tool for finding out quickly whether the person in front of you is worth a longer conversation. Here is how to build one that does that job.
Most professionals start preparing for negotiation when the offer arrives. By then several key decisions have already been made without them. Here is what to do before the offer lands.
The resume gets you on the yes pile. The cover letter is supposed to do something else entirely. Most people write the wrong document for that job. Every semester I read a stack of cover letters from students who are genuinely talented, genuinely motivated, and genuinely convinced that the letter they have written is good….
Most professionals evaluate opportunities by asking: is this good? The more useful question is harder to answer. And it changes almost every decision. Most professionals evaluate opportunities with some version of the same question: Is this good? Is the salary good? Is the company good? Is the role good? Is the timing good? These are…
The most concerning result of AI in professional communication is not bad writing. It is writing that is technically clean and intellectually absent. There is a distinction worth making between two kinds of AI-assisted professional communication. The first is work that AI has helped make better: clearer, better structured, more precisely worded. The human thinking…
Sooner or later, someone important will ask you to explain your thinking without a presentation, a document, or a screen. Most professionals are not ready. Here is how to fix that. At some point in most professional careers, a version of the following happens. You are in a corridor, or an elevator, or a dinner…
Randy Pausch said it once in a lecture that changed how I think about failure, legacy, and what a career is actually for. Almost 20 years later, it is still the most useful sentence I know. In 2007, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University stood up in front of 400 people and delivered…
The people you spend the most professional time with set the standard for what is normal. That standard is either working for you or against you. There is a principle in behavioural science that shows up in career research with uncomfortable consistency. The people you spend the most time with set the standard for what…
Most professionals spend more time preparing for the interview than for the offer conversation. The offer conversation is where the interview pays off. There is a pattern that repeats across hundreds of coaching conversations with professionals at every career stage. They prepare exhaustively for the interview: research, STAR answers, difficult questions, opening and closing. Then…
Most candidates either send a generic thank-you email within the hour or disappear entirely. Neither approach does what a follow-up is actually supposed to do. The job search advice on follow-up emails has not changed meaningfully in twenty years. Send a thank-you within 24 hours. Express your enthusiasm. Reiterate your interest. Keep it brief. This…
Before your resume reaches a human, it passes through software that has no interest in your achievements. Understanding how it works is not optional. Before your resume reaches any human being, it passes through a piece of software that has no interest in your achievements, your personality, or the care you took with the formatting….
The most common cover letter opening in 2026 tells the hiring manager exactly what kind of communicator you are. Unfortunately, it tells them the wrong thing. There is a sentence that appears in thousands of cover letters every day, and anyone who reads applications for a living is exhausted by it. It goes something like…
Most resumes fail before anyone reads them. Not because of formatting or keywords. Because they were built on the wrong premise. The resume sitting in most people’s job application folders is a filing system. A record of where they were, what their title was, and what the job description said they were supposed to do….
Most professionals wait until something goes wrong to look at how they communicate. Here is a 20-minute exercise to do before that happens.
The STAR method has been the gold standard for behavioral interview preparation for roughly 30 years. Built around four elements, Situation, Task, Action, and Result, it gives structure to answers that would otherwise sprawl into five minute rambles involving four different stakeholders and project details nobody needs. Structure is good. I am not here to…
Most job seekers spend 80% of their energy on the document and 20% on what actually gets them hired — how they talk about themselves.