How To Answer: "Tell Me About Yourself" Interview Question

in this video we're going to talk about the most critical question you're gonna get asked in an interview it is also the most common question you're gonna get asked in an interview and that question is so tell me about yourself most candidates do one of two things and faced with this question either number one they glanced down at their resume they go through it line by line and ultimately give the interviewer no real new information or two they start to piece together a story real time and ask themselves what do I include what do I leave out where do I start and when a candidate does this the interviewer has an incomplete picture and doesn't fully understand why you took each step in your career journey and the interviewer is then left with the unenviable task of trying to piece together different pieces of the puzzle of your career they apply their own pattern recognition having looked at other candidates and as a result you don't distinguish yourself from the competition because you haven't provided a comprehensive story about your career and why you're uniquely a good candidate and distinctive and distinguishable from the competition also there's a dirty secret about interviewing that many people do not know and that is that 60% of interviewers make up their mind on a candidate in the first five to 15 minutes of an interview and that data point alone should tell you why this is the most important question to excel in in an interview so now that we've talked about the critical importance of this question let's spend a little time on the intent of the question which is what is the question behind the question and there are three major intense behind this question intent number one connecting the dots does your work experience the capabilities you have the skill sets you have do they connect with what this job requires have you highlighted in your story the work that you've done and how that work applies to this job intent number two culture fit and what an interviewers trying to understand when they're thinking about culture fit is what drives and motivates you and does that connect with the purpose of their organization number two how do you lead how do you collaborate how do you work with others and does that align with their culture of collaboration and what makes you tick because your sense of purpose what motivates you should connect with what their purpose is as an organization intent number three is a sense of purpose do you really want this job or is this one of many jobs that you're targeting and what an interviewer is looking for is a sense of purpose and a clarity in your trajectory that suggests this is the job that makes the most sense to take the next step in your career and you want to frame it up as such because the interviewer also wants to feel like you really want this job now that we've talked about why this is a critical question and the intent behind the question let's talk about how to ace this part of the interview what you want to think about is how am I gonna structure my story and you want to structure it with three core components number one is the hook number two is the core chapters of your career and number three is the pitch element number one the hook this is the essence of your professional DNA and you want to think about two very important things when you talk about your hook what it is you do and why it is you do it when you think about what it is you do let's say you're a project manager what it is you do is bring together different stakeholders marketing finance product engineering to bear to solve complex problems another thing you do is take big conceptual problems and chunk them down to smaller manageable parts another thing you do is to make sure the engine is running and that you're meeting your milestones so think very deeply about what it is you do another example could be you're a marketer what what do you do as a marketer number one you really connect with your customer you empathize with them you understand what their deep needs are talk about that talk about how that translates into a campaign strategy and how that translates to increasing sales for your organization get very deep on what it is you do and how that translates to impact so that's the what dimension of your hook there's also the why dimension of your hook and the why comes down to why you actually do it if you're in healthcare maybe you do it because you enjoy having a positive impact on society you like improving the quality of life for people maybe you're in transportation you like the idea of connecting the world bringing the latest technologies to bear to improve speed and quality of travel so tell me more about the why get very deep on the why and when you connect what it is you do and why does you do it that forms a very compelling hook that is gonna distinguish you from the competition now that we have the hook in place something you're gonna spend ten to twenty percent of your time talking about you're now gonna spend sixty percent of your time talking about the core chapters of your career and you can talk about your core chapters in one of two ways either a chronologically or be functionally let's talk about how to chronologically articulate the chapters of your career let's give an example maybe you've been in the IT industry for 15 years and you've had seven roles you do not want to describe every role at detail instead you want to chunk it up in anywhere between two to four chapters now why two to four it's the same reason why Social Security numbers are chunked up into two to four digits at a time it's just way easier to remember that way so if you spend 15 years in the IT industry you might start off framing up the early chapter of your career as getting the building blocks down of core technologies or maybe you spent the early part of your career doing helpdesk and very getting very close to the most critical challenges the end consumer faces and consuming technology maybe the middle chapter of your career means you started taking on some leadership roles you started diving into IT project management and working with people beyond your current team and that could be your second chapter and maybe your third and most recent chapter you've actually gone and expanded beyond just IT and are also playing a role in marketing and helping the marketing team stand up their IT capabilities what you're looking to do with this chronological framing is show a leap in the set of capabilities you're bringing to bear the experiences you've gained and how these leaps are ultimately going to tie to this next leap in this job another way to frame the chapters of your career is to do it functionally instead of chronologically particularly if your career has not followed a straight line and it's not going to be clear to the interviewer why you made the changes you did it's more important to frame up the distinct functions you've worked on as opposed to the timing of when you worked on those a functional example could be well I spent my career working on three types of areas number one was marketing where I really got to understand the voice of the customer and how to connect my company's value proposition with that customer number two is communications and in communications I really learned to fine tune language bill stories and create narratives that resonate and when you talk about this communication chapter you can connect it with the marketing chapter because there is an overlap and you might say the third chapter of my career was working on Investor Relations and I really got to hone some of the voice of customer skills I got on marketing as well as the storytelling and narrative skills I got on communication and apply that to investor relations where the stakeholders were a bit different and frankly the stakes were higher and now when you connect the discrete functions of what you've done and how they connect you can present a compelling candidacy without having to explain away or defend the non-linearity of your career now that we have the hook in place and the core chapters of your career articulated this third and final part of the answer is the pitch and in the pitch you want to answer three core questions why this job why now and why this company so let's take the example of a candidate who had a combination of marketing experience communication experience and investor relations experience and let's assume this candidate was applying for a job specifically in the marketing space and specifically for a healthcare company the way this candidate could frame up their pitch and differentiate themselves potentially from candidates who only have experience in marketing is to say I'm very excited about the opportunity to combine my deep marketing skills with my communication experience where I really learned on how to fine-tune language and the experience I bring to bear from the investor relations space where I really understood how to speak to different audiences when the stakes are very high similarly stakes are very high in healthcare and all of a sudden you can connect those things in a unique way the candidate could also say and I'm excited about doing this now because the healthcare industry is at a unique inflection point where technology is evolving very rapidly and for me this is a unique time to actually play a role in the healthcare sector and then the candidate could go on and say I'm particularly excited about your company because I think you're doing some of the most innovative things in this sector and I'm excited about making a difference with this company and that way you're combining why this job why now and why this company now before we wrap up I want to leave you with three guiding principles to follow when you tell your story number one be synthesized and synthesis does not mean being brief for the sake of brevity rather it means being very purposeful and deliberate about the most salient aspects of your candidacy that you want to articulate and that they tied to impact you're gonna tell your story in roughly less than three minutes so be very smart about what it is you share and even smarter about what you leave out number two make sure there is a strong of clarity when you tell your story and often what happens in the pursuit of clarity is that people lose synthesis because they tend to give a lot of details to be exceptionally clear and instead what happens is all those details leave the interviewer with an information overload so be very clear about what you share and what that means is being precise as opposed to giving tons of details and three think about two to three sound bites that you want the interviewer to leave the interview with because ultimately when they walk out of the interview what they're gonna remember is a handful of sound bites and those are the sound bites they're gonna share with their colleagues with their hiring managers with HR so think about what these sound bites might be and make sure they're part of your narrative it could be about a unique project you've worked on it could be about unique impact you've had in your career or it could be something that's just unique about you as an individual and these type of sound bites are really going to make sure you distinguish yourself from the competition these are some of the best practices to consider when framing up your story and what we do at rocket interview is sit down with you and figure out what are the most salient aspects of your candidacy the best stories you've had in your professional career and then we weave them together to form a compelling career narrative that elevates you above the competition allows you to ace the interview and secure your dream job

Channel: AccelaCoach

Views: 47,943

Keywords: tell me about yourself question and answer, behavioral questions, behavioral interview questions, interview questions, job interview questions and answers, interview tips, job interview tips, interview prep, star interview questions and answers, star interview method, star interview technique

Id: DuPl-EA89Lo

Length: 14min 21sec (861 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 16 2017