TELL ME ABOUT YOURSELF
I’m going to give you my 4 best strategy tips to answering tell me about yourself. This is one of the most difficult questions for people to answer, but its also one of the easiest because it just you talking about you. And you can be certain that no matter what kind of interview you have coming up, your interviewer will ask you, tell me about yourself and I want you to totally slam dunk this question with an answer that makes you look awesome.
If you are ready to knock this question out of the park, give this video a thumbs up, but only if you really like it, and let’s dive right in.
Before we get started, First things first, when answering this question, never talk about your personal or family life. When interviewers asks you, “Tell me about yourself”, they don’t want to hear about your personal life choices, favorite sports team or what you like to do for fun. Instead, they want to hear about your qualifications, your experiences, accomplishments, as well as why you’re a good fit for this role. They just want a snapshot of your professional background and experience.
And second, stories sell, so I’m going to show you how to tell them your professional work story in a way that is engaging, compelling, conversational and concise.
Okay, let’s start off with step #1 for tell me about yourself.
You want to give a brief a snapshot of your professional work history. Start your answer by going back to your first professional job and describe where you worked, your title, how long you worked there and your responsibilities.
So let’s you started your career 12 years ago as a software programmer and then you moved up to a senior programmer and now you are a program manager.
When you tell your snapshot story, you’re going to start with your role as a as a software programmer and it might sound like this:
“I started off my career as a software programmer with Chase industrial supply five years ago where I maintained their CRM system, provided user support.”
Easy enough, right? Now just do the same thing for each one of your positions. All you are doing is telling a little story snapshot for every position you’ve held up to your current position.
Not let’s move on to step 2. Add on an achievement to each one of your snapshot stories. So after you tell them about one of your jobs, wrap it up by describing one major accomplishment you achieved.
An accomplishment is something you did where you saved the company money, improved a process, created something new, landed a huge account, invented something, had a brilliant idea for how something should be done. The best accomplishments are things that were above and beyond your job requirements and ones that are quantifiable, so use numbers if possible.
Adding to our first example, you would wrap it up by saying:
“One of the things I’m most proud of is the expense tracking mobile app I created that allowed our field sales force to upload their daily sales totals through their phones. This allowed the company to get accurate accounting figures in real-time which improved inventory control and cash flow management by 17%”
Are you with me so far? Start of by giving a brief snapshot of a position and tack on an accomplishment. Then move on to your next positions and keep doing this until you have covered them all.
Next, step #3 for tell me about yourself. After you told them about all of your jobs, Tell the interviewer what you know about this position. You want to show the employer that you know what they are looking for in this job.
Then you would move on to say something like:
“I understand that you are not only looking for a senior developer experienced in Agile, but one who has managed a team of developers for cradle to grave projects.”
Saying this shows the interviewer that you understand their needs. It’s much easier to influence someone when you show them that you understand them.
And just by saying that, “I’m aware that you are looking for a senior developer who can lead others and knows the agile framework”
Now you are building rapport and creating a connection with the interviewer.
Finally, on to step 4. Tell the employer why you are the right fit for the position. This is where you wrap up your answer. And this is where most job seekers fall short because they skip this crucial step and they kind leave their answer hanging to where it falls flat.
This is the final step to influencing your interviewer so they can vividly see you as the perfect fit for this job.
So, to wrap up your answer, after you have given mini snapshots for each of your jobs, the last thing you want to say is something like this:
“So based on my strong background in building and leading teams of developers, managing web development projects using agile, and creating mobile business apps, I believe I’m uniquely qualified to not only succeed in this role, but hit the ground running as your new program manager on day one.”
It’s very important that you tell the interviewer why you are the right fit for the job. If you don’t, then you are missing a big and easy opportunity to sell yourself as a solution to their problems.
And the last part of the answer is super important, where I say “I believe I’m uniquely qualified to not only succeed in this role, but hit the ground running as your new program manager on day one”
This statement presupposes they will hire you. It instantly forces them to visualize you in the role. It’s a very powerful statement. And you are telling them you are uniquely qualified, which presupposes that you are the only one who possesses this set of skills. And you tell them you can hit the ground running on day one. This means you don’t require training and really know your stuff.
So, now you know how to answer one of the toughest interview questions, but it’s not really that tough is it now? It’s just you talking about you.
If you liked this video, then please give it a thumbs up, subscribe, share it with your friends. And thank you so much for watching. I will see you in the next video.
Now you might be saying Don, well, that’s all fine and dandy if I have 10 years of experience, but what do I say if I’m fresh out of college and never had a professional job?
Good question.
You still want to use the same 4-step framework, but apply it to your college years. Start off by telling them why you chose your major, what you liked about it, projects you worked on in college, internships, and even what your role was in various clubs. Then move on and talk about where you see yourself going in your career and wrap it up by tying in the requirements for the job to your step 4 closing statement. Does that sounds good?
Alright, that’s all I have for you today.
If you liked this video, then give it a thumbs up, subscribe to my channel and share it with a friend.
If you would like to go farther and deeper into other possible questions you can expect to get asked, I would encourage you to check out the complete interview answer guide.
