“Tell me about yourself”, often the first question of your interview is the first chance for you to solidify or change their perspective on who you are. That’s why it’s key for you to take full advantage of this answer and put your first foot forward.
When walking into an interview. What’s the first question you’ll get asked? If you’re here, you probably already know the answer to the answer. That’s right – it’s tell me about yourself.
It’s probably one of the most universal, yet tough questions to answer. So how exactly do you concisely summarize your life’s work and the things you value all in 2 minutes?
Here’s the thing…I don’t want you to follow generic templates you can easily find. When it comes to anything job search, there rarely is a magic one size fits all approach. That’s probably not what you want to be reading, but it’s also why I’ve come up with this guide. 💪
It’ll walk through how to experiment with different methods to highlight the unique stories and professional journey you have.
I’ll also share a few ways to organize your thoughts, some do’s and don’ts, and examples of what works well. It’ll take a few tries of shifting key stories around to see how everything flows. Ready to go? Let’s dive right in.
Why prepare at all?
More often than not, this is the first impression you make in the interview. Chances are the moment you meet the interviewer, they’re (either consciously or subconsciously) trying to figure out who you are.
Research studies have told us that it only takes seconds for people to form an impression. For example, Willis and Todorov from Princeton found that all it took was 100-500 milliseconds for someone to start assessing your sense of trustworthiness, competence, and aggressiveness!
When you’re thinking about interview answers in general, think about it like an essay: your introduction, body, and conclusion.
The 5 Steps to acing “tell me about yourself”
There are 5 major elements that you need to think about. Remember, the goal here is to paint a full picture, at a high-level of who you are while sharing enough details to set the tone that you mean business 🤓 Read on!
- The Intro: Figure out how you want to kickstart your answer (or choose to skip it)
- The Structure: Come up with some stories or achievements you bring to the table. Find common themes between your notes and use them to structure your answer by selecting 1 of the 4 chunking methods below.
- The Stories: Pick your hero and sidekick stories. Start building out a full narrative around them.
- The Personal Stuff: End with something personal to show them who you are outside of the professional world.
- The Trial Run: Practice this all and see how it feels. If it’s not quite right, move a few things around and try again. It should sound natural. This is about you – you are the expert, so you need to be confident and have a good flow.
Start with a bang…or not 🤷♂️
Ok, step 1, the intro! The interviewers are waiting for you to tell them about you! So how do you start? Do you greet them? Or say your name again? (In all seriousness, you don’t need to repeat the basic facts about yourself, like your name! Hopefully, you’ve already greeted your interviewers).
Most people I speak to start with something quite generic. “I have 15 years of experience working as a chef. I’ve worked at 3 different kitchens where I ordered supplies and created my own menus” While I get a sense of what you did, it doesn’t really scream unique or authentic, does it? 🥱
If you feel like you have time, try hooking them in with a story or fact that will help you stand out.
“My passion for food is something that I think my grandparents really nurtured in me growing up. I remember waking up early in the morning when they’d rush me to morning dim sum and took me shopping, listing the endless possibilities on how to use ingredients. This is why I still love pushing the boundaries with my own food today, even after 15 years as a chef.”
Maybe that’s too flashy or unnatural for your taste – that’s okay too! There are times when I simply take the conversational tone and respond with a simple “Sure, I’d love to tell you about myself” and proceed with my body points. This way, I’m saving time for the unique stories I have in the body tone.
So yes, start with a bang, or not. But don’t make them snooze.
Making your points digestible 🧩
Step two is about figuring out ideas of what you’ve done and being organizing your thoughts. What you’ll want to explore during this time is how you can best summarize your career into neat little concepts. Oftentimes, when we trial run their answers to “tell me about yourself”, most of my clients go into deep details, listing off each and every one of their experiences and what they did.
While it’s great to cover a lot of ground, it isn’t exactly the easiest to follow. So ask yourself, if the interviewer had to write down 2-5 things about me, what would they be?
Organize your thoughts
I call this conceptualizing or chunking! What I want you to think about is how to organize your core experiences together. If it’s helpful, write everything down onto a few sticky notes and move them around to find things that are alike.
If you need some help, I’ve come up with four ways you can group things together based on your experiences. Remember, each person’s path is different, so test out a few of these using your stories to see what flows nicely and feels most natural.
(1) Career Phases 💡
Best used for those with career changes or a wealth of experience
Using this method, you can break up your career progression into multiple categories or types of jobs. For example, you might say “I’d like to think of my career as having three phases: (1) Adult learning, (2) Coaching, and (3) Customer Success.
(2) Skills Based 🛠
Best used for generalists or showcasing a list of transferrable skills
When you’re thinking about your best assets, try to find common skills you’ve developed or will be most relevant to the current job you’re applying for. You might say something like “There are three skills I think are the superpowers I’d bring to the job: my ability to manage relationships, my experiences with prospecting, and how to take data and use it to make business decisions.
(3) Career Progression ⏫
Best used to show growth or when you’re applying to jobs in a similar field
Chronologically following the key steps of your career. It can be in reverse order if your recent jobs are more relevant. If you’ve had a long career, it’s okay to start mid-way so long as you allude to the earlier stages of your career as well.
In this case, you might want to categorize your experience based on the roles you’ve held (e.g. joined as an intern, offered a full-time position, promoted as a team leader, laterally moved to a different company).
(4) Present-Past-Future ⏰
Best used for folks earlier in their career
This is a great method to showcase your ambitions and the key milestones that you think are important as set yourself up to achieve those goals. For example, you can talk about a recent degree you completed, the projects you’ve taken on, and the type of jobs that motivate you most.
Summon Your Hero and Sidekick Stories
The reality is that you’ll have roughly 2 minutes to tell the hiring manager who you are before they’re itching to move on. So you have to use your time wisely!
After you’ve decided on your overall answer structure, it’s now time to think about how to make your experiences feel more concrete and shine.
Let’s say you decided to use career phases as your structure and are interviewing for a job in sales-related work. You may have three phases that you want to go through. But you probably won’t have time to give in-depth details for every single phase. In that case, you might choose to include 1-2 hero stories and one sidekick story.
A hero story is one that really persuades the interviewer that you’re the real deal. It goes into details:
- What are the stats or metrics to show success?
- What impact did you make?
- What’s the context (the tools you use, the skills you learned, the responsibilities you had)
Here’s an example of one hero story that you might share after introducing the main concept (in this case, someone’s experience in Customer Success).
“The last phase of my career is my time in Customer Success. I’ve worked in multiple industries in both a B2B and B2C capacity. I started in B2B account management at Company X, where I nurtured sales prospects from cradle to grave, meaning I onboarded customers, implemented our technology, shared strategies, and best practices analyzed customer data and found opportunities to upsell my customers. I was managing up to 30 clients with a total value of over 3 million dollars! One of my proudest accomplishments in CS was my work with Customer Y, where I expanded the account by 700% in 1.5 years. I learned that my giving strategic advice, planting the right seeds for future opportunities, and never pushing for a sale I didn’t find was valuable, I was able to maintain an organic yet strong upsell record.”
Sidekick stories
Sidekick stories are ones where maybe you gloss over a few details but still give a sense of what you accomplished or learned. I’d suggest using these stories when it’s not hyper-relevant to the job, but you want to show your background or expertise in skills that are transferrable. Keep in mind, there’s still a full interview left!
“Sure, I’d love to share my story with you. I like to think of my experiences as being in three phases. I began my career in technical writing, writing help articles, and guides for a healthcare technology company to a few different audiences. This phase of my career is so fundamental to how I continue to work today. I learned how to properly break down information and format things to make it most digestible.
Tell them about yourself outside of work
I know the point of this answer isn’t to tell your life story, but I find it’s always nice to include a snippet of who you are outside of work. It brings a level of personalization and one last thing to remember you by.
Interviewers are going to be your colleagues – they want to know who you are outside of the work stuff. Just don’t forget to keep it fairly short and sweet! What are some things you can bring up?
- A few of your hobbies and interests, is there something to remember you by?
- How you’d define yourself or your worldview
- An interesting fact or story about yourself
- A passion-project or goals you’ve set for yourself
- What’s most important to you?
A note about your personal journey
Managerie.io has an awesome article that focuses on acknowledging a few key elements to really make your answer feel authentic. It’s crazy how quickly it can shift the energy in the room. They offered three principles that I think are things to consider sprinkling into “tell me about yourself.”
- Acknowledge that your path wasn’t linear, or that things didn’t always work as expected (it’s okay to be human, you know?)
- Try spending some time on how you made decisions. How you approach your journey (instead of what you’ve done) is something that sets you apart.
- Highlight your intentions: what was your vision and how are you wired?
The final touch: find what works best
This might seem obvious, but the last bit of this is to practice putting it all together! Here are a few things to keep in mind:
- Remember, your journey is unique, as is the job that you’ll be interviewing for. So it may take a little bit of moving things around or rethinking how you frame your stories before it feels right.
- Don’t memorize – interviews are meant to be conversations, and rarely does an over-rehearsed answer sound credible.
- Record yourself! This is a great way to see how everything flows together.
Do you need help figuring out the best way to put all this together? Check out our interview prep coaching sessions! Or hey, if you’re ready to go, start thinking about other types of interview questions here. Tell me about yourself if just the beginning 🙂
