Interview Question: "Tell Me About Yourself" 

Tell me something about yourself.

It’s such a scary, open-ended interview question.

There are a million answers, and most of them are wrong.

Don’t panic.

There’s a reason employers make you introduce yourself.

And—

There’s a solid formula to give the perfect answer.

Answer Tell Me About Yourself In 4 Easy Steps

Here’s a bad dream:

You sit down for the interview. The hiring manager smiles and says—

Tell me about yourself.

You gulp. You start to talk. You hope you’re saying the right things.

But you get the nagging feeling you’re blowing it.

You know they’re not looking for fun facts about yourself. But what do they want?

It’ll be okay.

Here’s the formula:

How to Answer the Tell Me About Yourself Interview Question

1. Start with an important strength the hiring manager is drooling for.
2. Tell how that skill or quality helped your recent employer.
3. Give metrics to show it helped a past employer too.
4. Tell how this new opportunity will help you grow your talents even more.

Here are two tell me something about yourself examples for experienced candidates.

Tell Me About Yourself Examples

Here’s a great tell me about yourself sample answer for experienced IT professionals:

right

Q: Tell us a bit about yourself. A: (1) I really enjoy providing robust software solutions.  (2) I’ve led a software engineering team of 10 programmers at Xyzzy Solutions for three years. Our proudest moment was receiving the 2018 Bossie award.  (3) Before that I worked for two years as a software engineer at SurgeWallop. I slashed security breaches 70% by winning full employee buy-in for our Principle of Least Privilege drive.  (4) It’s been a great run, but I’m chafing at the bit to sink my teeth in with a high-performing DevOps team like the one at Brass LAMP Dev.

wrong
I’ve always been really interested in computers. I guess for the past nine years now I’ve been a programmer, but my passion for tech started way back when I was a kid. I’ve always loved monkeying around with code, but it wasn’t until I moved to Arizona that I tried to make a living off it. I got really into it and I can’t imagine doing anything else.

 

Think of it as your elevator pitch. An elevator pitch is a short summary used to quickly and simply define a product, service, or business and its value proposition. It answers the question: “Why should I buy/invest?” It should be concise enough to be delivered during a short elevator ride (to the 5th floor, not to the 105th floor).
You need an elevator pitch for yourself as a job candidate — and it should be customized for different opportunities. Keep it focused and short, ideally less than a minute, and no more than 2 minutes.
You won’t be able to fit all of your great qualities and resume high points into 2 minutes, so you’ll have to spend some time thinking about how to present yourself in a way that starts the interview on the right note.