I grew up in a place and went to school somewhere. My hobbies include several things that demonstrate commitment and ambition. My values exactly match those of this company. My biggest dream in life is to work hard to make your shareholders lots of money.

“To truly understand, we’ll have to go back to the summer of 1979…”

I’d recommend looking on YouTube, “Life After Layoff” has some good interview advice. There’s many more, but that’s the one I remember right now.

Generally, the response should be related to you’re “professional life”, not your private one. They don’t care that you have 6 brothers and sisters and like to hike - your looking for a job, not a date. If your job happened to be for a national park baby sitting children, then your personal life just became much more relevant.

This question can be used to naturally lead into the “where do you see your self in 5 years” question, by talking about some of your career goals (if relevenat). Let’s say your goal is to be a park ranger, and the job your appling is to go around the park cleaning up - that’s a reasonable jump. If your planning to leave the job after a bit, don’t tell them anything to make it obvious.

If you can bring relevant past expirances of things you did (not just job title) into the conversation that’s good. Maybe you used to work at the local park keeping it clean from the local teens, advocated for trashbins to be installed and you want to continue taking care of nature on a larger scale.

Obviously those examples are completely made up, but including expirances to your responces can make a huge difference.

Potentially you could say that you were investigating re-training and doing Udemy courses if you wanted to make it sound like you were not just sitting on your hands in the employment gap.

To be honest, as someone who has been sitting on the other side of the desk doing a lot of interviews on behalf of my company recently, I don’t really pry into the employment gaps. A lot of people put on their CV that they were focusing on their family commitments during the gap and there’s no real reason to question it. Employers are interested on the relevant experience that the candidate has over their entire career as opposed to just the last position they held.

I spend time highlighting how my past experience relates to the job and what I like about the place or job specifically. Depending on the vibe in the room I will add one quick, interesting, and nonoffensive thing about my personal life at the end. Basically recapping a cover letter but in a personable way because my writing is dry

I work in a job where I have to introduce myself quite a lot. For a longer introduction like you would in an interview, I do the following:

• General statement about my career, one liner

• the professional topics I’m most interested, 3 or 4 bullet points

• a brief walk through my resume: what I studied (one liner) and where I worked, no longer than 1 minute total

• what am I doing currently, responsibilities, likes and dislikes, no more than a minute, they’ll ask you more about it later

• some personal details: family, kids, hobbies, favorite {teams, sports, countries, movies, whatever} keep it to 20-30 seconds

Total under 3 minutes

For a shorter one, like in a 1h zoom call:

• name, position (and description of the position if unusual), tenure.

• any relationship to the people in the call (I’m a customer of yours, my first car was from you, I would love to buy gizmo some day, etc)

• background info: previous jobs or studies if relevant (oh, i used to work in industry in college, etc)

• one hobby if relevant, or if it is in your background (movies, books, sports, photography, whatever)

Total 15 to 30 seconds.

When I was in your position I was honest about it and detailed what my ‘work’ was in caring for my mom.

I suppose it did help that I was looking to be hired at a group home so the skills lined up.

But showing that you’re motivated, care, and are detail oriented in your personal life can speak volumes about you while also covering for the gaps in your employment history.

It’s difficult to do but you can practice in front of a mirror. All shaggy dig stories should be at least 30 minutes in length and end with a lich ness monster asking you for about tree fiddy.

Realistically, these people are thinking “I’m going to have to talk to this person at the coffee pot every day, please dear mother Theresa I hope he’s got something more interesting to talk about than Dave who only discussed work and his commute”

They want to know how you’ll fit culturally, or rather, will you be additive? What’s something interesting about you or a hobby you have? What’s a funny story that might happen to you in the weekend that they might find some interesting?