An essay is a free-form essay that expresses and argues the author's position on an issue. Although essays are mostly associated with literature classes at school or homework assignments at university, some people also write them when applying for a job. For an employer, an essay is an additional way to evaluate a potential employee. All because of the highly competitive job market: when there are a lot of great candidates around, you need to bring out the best of the best. With the help of the essay the employer also evaluates the communication skills of the candidate: the ability to write a competent business letter, the ability to clearly state and argue his thoughts. Read more here.
The topic of the essay can be free or suggested by the employer. It is chosen so that the candidate shows through the text his/her personal qualities, professional ambitions, vision of himself/herself as a specialist, level of competence in a particular issue, creativity in case we are talking about creative professions, or other skills and abilities. For example, an employer might suggest the following topics:
Me and my career;
What else should we know about you as a candidate?
My life goals;
Tell us how you overcame life's challenges;
What attracted you to our company?
Structure of the essay
An essay consists of three parts - the introduction, the main part, and the conclusion. An essay always contains a thesis - the main idea, the author's position. The thesis can be in the beginning of the essay, if the author already has a point of view on this problem, or in the conclusion, if he comes to it as a result of reasoning. Any thesis should be supported by two or three arguments. The arguments in turn should be illustrated by two or three examples. The general scheme of an essay:
Introduction and the thesis statement;
Argument 1;
Example 1;
Example 2;
Example 3;
Argument 2;
Example 1;
Example 2;
Example 3;
Conclusion.
Introduction .
The task of the introduction is to capture the reader's attention: to ask an exciting question, to confront him with a paradox, a contradiction. The introduction should intrigue the reader so that he or she cannot resist reading the rest of the text. Let's consider an example of an introduction to an essay on "My Professional Path": "I am a hereditary lawyer with more than 10 years of experience. Advocacy is my vocation: all my life I have devoted to improving my professional skills." It's a trivial and flat introduction that builds on clichés like "my vocation," "hereditary lawyer." It is also dry - it has bare facts and general words, but no interesting story and no "three-dimensional" protagonist.
Here's an example of a more interesting introduction: "When I was celebrating a decade ago from the beginning of my career as a lawyer, one of my fellow students remembered that after law school I wanted to be anything but a lawyer. I was surprised to realize that this was the pure truth - I had been sent to law school by my parents to pursue a family business I had no interest in at all. I would have liked to have seen the face of that twenty-year-old boy if he had known that all his future professional pursuits, full of ups and downs, would lead him exactly where he started - to the bar. This introduction could have been written by the same person, but it is fundamentally different from the first example: it has a story and an intrigue: the secret of the hero's professional transformation is hidden from us. The introduction should be like a puzzle that is missing a detail or something doesn't add up, and you can only "collect" this puzzle if you finish reading the text to the end.
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