Introductions  ·  9 September 2026

Seven Hundred Mock Interviews in Seoul. Here Is the Good News.

I have met hundreds who were never shown how to say it. That is a completely different problem, and unlike talent, it is teachable. This blog is where I teach it in public.

Why a blog, and why now

The numbers are blunt. Ninety percent of web pages get no organic traffic from Google at all (Ahrefs, 2020). Eight readers in ten never get past the headline (Copyblogger). Seventy nine percent of people scan a page before they read a word of it properly.

Read those as bad news and you will never publish anything. Read them correctly and they are the most encouraging statistics in professional communication. They mean the field is not won by the most gifted writer. It is won by the person who learned the rules and then applied them, week after week, while everyone else was still waiting to feel ready.

That is a competition you can win. It is, in fact, the only kind worth entering.

Who is writing this

I am Matthew Clement. I teach career communication at Hanyang University's Center for Creative Convergence Education, where I have been for eighteen years.

Before the university I trained communication teams inside Daewoo, Daelim, Doosan, SK Energy and Samsung affiliates. That is where I learned what Korean organisations actually reward when they say they want good English. Before that I presented on Arirang TV, SBS Radio and TBS, which is where I learned that clarity is a performance, not a personality trait.

My academic training is in political science and policy, so I read every communication problem as an incentives problem first. Who is in the room. What they are measured on. What they are actually listening for, as opposed to what the job posting says.

Every year I run more than fifteen hours of individual mock interviews with over forty students, recorded, twenty minutes each. Almost everything I publish here starts in that room, with a real person, a real question, and a twenty second silence I have learned to sit through.

What this blog is about

One niche: career communication in Korea, in English. Three pillars, and every post I publish sits under one of them.

Interview performance. What to say in the first ninety seconds, what to stop saying, and how to answer the question behind the question.

Written self presentation. Resumes, cover letters, LinkedIn profiles and the self introduction letter, judged the way a hiring manager actually reads them, which is quickly and unsentimentally.

Working across cultures. How Korean workplace norms land on a foreign employer, how foreign expectations land here, and what to do when the two disagree in a meeting you are sitting in.

Who this is for

Korean university students preparing for a first professional interview in English. Graduates a year or two out who have realised that the thing holding them back is not their ability but their account of it. Anyone building a career across two languages and two sets of expectations.

What you can expect from me

One post a week, every week, with something in it you can use before Friday.

Real examples from real sessions, with names and companies removed. Evidence where I have it and a citation where I borrowed it. And where I am guessing, I will say that I am guessing, because the alternative is the confident nonsense that fills most career advice online.

Everything I ask my students to do, I am doing here in public. They build blogs, record podcasts and put their work in front of strangers for fifteen weeks. It seemed dishonest to ask that of them and not stand in the same place myself.

So: what are you preparing for? Tell me in the comments and I will write about it. That is not a closing line. It is genuinely how I choose what comes next.