If you’re a beginner, you want to make your answers as long as possible.
When you advance, you want to make your answers succinct.
In case this is your first time encountering the word succinct, it means briefly and clearly expressed.
When you’re starting and you don’t have a lot of practice expressing yourself, you want to be able to try and force yourself to write 100 or 200 sentence essays.
I want you to write long essays so you have a space where you get to see all your ideas.
I also want you to select your best ideas and use those for the short version that you will likely use during the interview.
When you’ve become comfortable expressing yourself, you want to pick your best ideas and use those ideas in your shorter version.
So for each topic, you want to have the following versions:
You might be thinking…
Where do I use all these versions?
Why the hell should I go through all this trouble?
Depending on the situation, you’re going to be required to give a longer or shorter answer.
If you tell the interviewer…
My name is Kevin. I live in Parañaque and I work in Makati. Before being a BPO worker, I was working in sales. I also spend my free time writing, baking, going to the gym, going on road trips, and exploring with my bicycle.
If your interviewer is interested in your experience baking, you should be able to talk about that in detail.
If you mentioned anything interesting, the interviewer will ask you to give more details, examples, and stories related to what they find interesting.
And what you want to realize is that different interviewers are interested in different details.
In a lot of cases, you already have that information.
Unfortunately, that information is either in Filipino or poorly worded.
As you may already know, translating from Filipino to English during an interview is incredibly stressful and the output when you translate during a stressful situation is usually not very good.
My solution is to do all that thinking and preparation at home and before your interview.
Going to the interview prepared can help you minimize loss of opportunities because of simple mistakes.
90% of mistakes could have been prevented if you only set a schedule to sit down and write long versions of your answers.
Please write the longer version before you attempt to write the shorter version.
Here are a few recommended stories to write for the interview:
Thank you for reading this far and thanks for your attention.
I am praying for your success. God bless!
If you made it this far, you should introduce yourself.
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