“Tell Me Something About Yourself” Guide
- Connect your personal strengths with supporting examples of the past experiences.
- Focus on details and outcomes you can count on.
- Don’t Repeat and Summarize your resume in interview .
- Share positive past experiences and proven successes.
- Specify your current job responsibilities that matches your job role.
- Avoid mentioning personal information related to your marital status, children, political or religious views.
- Highlight your positive personality attributes.
- Don’t get into deeper conversations about the role and company so early in the interview duration.
- Connect your personal skills with the job description.
- Briefly mention about hobbies, intellectual development and community involvement.
Questions like “Tell Me About Yourself” are frequently asked at the beginning of any type of interviews online or offline to get the conversation started. Other examples include “Walk me through your resume,” “Tell Me Something About Yourself that’s not on your resume” and “How would you describe yourself?” These types of questions are very commonly asked questions. They are ambiguous and it can be hard to understand that what the interviewer really wants to know. But there is an opportunity for you in that ambiguity. Your interviewer is allowing you to choose how to respond.
How to Get Started: Cracking the Tell Me About Yourself Interview Question
Here are few questions to ask as you brainstorm ways to respond and structure your answer:
What qualities make you a great fit for this position? Think of what makes you stand out as a job applicant for this role. Perhaps it’s your years of experience or some highly desired specialisation, training or technical skills. Review the job description closely and note the ways by which you exceed the requirements.
Why are you interested in the role? bring light on why this position excites you, how it fits into your larger career goals and why you feel it’s the best next step.
Why are you interested in the company or the industry? After you’ve spent time researching the company and the industry, you should have a better sense of the mission, goals and trends impacting the industry. Do these align with the professional goals that you’ve set for yourself? What do you like and respect about the company as a whole? What excites you about the future of the industry? As you start building your story, tie together similarities among your professional goals, the future vision of the company and industry trends you feel are especially important.
With all the above in mind, ask yourself, What is a positive trait or characteristic that I’ve had for a long time that will serve me well in this role? For example, Think how your friends or colleagues described you as especially organised, curious, entrepreneurial or generous? Think about how you’ve thought of yourself or how others have seen you.Compare these two perceptions and than think of an answer. Also think of recent examples from your life when you got and actioned that characteristic.
How to Answer the Tell Me About Yourself Interview Question
The answer to “Tell Me About Yourself” can set the Interviewer’s mood for the whole interview. Use the following answers to counter these type of questions:
Mention past experiences and proven successes as they relate to the position. Begin by re-reading the job description of the company your are applying in.Try and match the job description attributes with your past experiences and recent stories.
Consider how your current job relates to the job you’re applying for. Is it a more senior role? If so, explain how you are taking on more responsibilities in your current position. If you are making a lateral transition to a role with different skills, describe how your current skills translate into the new position.
Focus on strengths and abilities that you can support with examples. When you start building the script of each example, focus on details and outcomes that you can quantify, if possible. For example, stating that you “improved customer service” is less impactful than “increased customer service response rates each quarter by 10 percent–15 percent.” If you don’t have the exact information, estimate a realistic value.
Highlight your personality to break the ice. Because the “Tell Me About Yourself” interview question is about getting to know you, it’s a good idea to share information about your personality with your interviewer—but not personal details. You can briefly mention hobbies that demonstrate intellectual development and/or community engagement (e.g. reading, music, sports league, volunteering) or those that showcase personal discipline and achievement (e.g. learning a new skill, training for a half marathon).
Things to you must avoid
There are a lot of mistakes that many interviewees make during the interview. Here, take a look at some of the points that you should avoid in an interview:
Avoid mentioning personal information like marital status, children, political or religious affiliations, etc. These types of topics can be very sensitive topics to touch and also they have nothing to do with the job role and the company as these type of conversations can work against the individual itself.
Avoid Listing multiple, vague strengths without suitable examples. Instead, you may want to choose two or three qualities about yourself.Support each with short, polished stories that should be relatable and have something to do with your job rather than unnecessary life stories.
Don’t summarise your resume word for word.Try to share those points that are relevant to the position which are not listed in your resume.
Don’t rush into conversations regarding what you’re looking for in the role or how the company can benefit you. Always try to have these types of conversations at the end of the interview when you have an idea that the interviewer is impressed with you.
