Toughest Interview Questions: #1 Tell Me About Yourself

By John Heaney on October 20, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Interviewing, The Search, Video

The granddaddy of all job interview questions is still, surprisingly, the one that proves the most difficult for the majority of job seekers to answer.

Tell me about yourself.

It’s really more of a request than a question, but it can put you on the spot and knock you out of contention for the job if you don’t respond appropriately.

The most important thing to recognize is what the interviewer wants to hear. They don’t want to hear about your childhood, your college years or your hobbies and interests. They want to get a feel for your skills, experience, talents and accomplishments.

Do not ask the interview for clarification on the question, or whether they’re interested in you personally or professionally. You’re not responding to Match.com you’re in a job interview. You ought to know what they’re interested in. And you can be pretty sure that they want to hear about your technical writing skills and not your tennis game.

You should walk into every interview ready with a 90 second to 2 minute response that contains the key elements that they want to hear:

1. A brief introduction
2. Your key accomplishments
3. Your primary strengths demonstrated by these accomplishments
4. The importance of these strengths to the employer
5. How you see yourself developing these talents further for the employer

I’ll assume you’ve already done the groundwork and have taken a complete inventory of your personal strengths and professional accomplishments. And you’ve determined which of those attributes are MOST important to the employer.

Let’s assume you’re interviewing for a position as project manager for a software development company. You’ve got the skills and experience necessary to do the job, now you’ve got to convey, concisely, how you can help the employer achieve their business objectives by hiring you.

I’ve spent my entire career in software development, loving the challenges of staying on top of the latest technologies and creating thoughtful software solutions that help businesses perform better.
Although I’ve always loved the process of coding applications, I discovered early on that I enjoy the strategic elements of software development even more. I’ve always been extremely organized, and I’ve discovered that my ability to envision and organize complex tasks is crucial to successful software development. At my last job, I was responsible for the mobile applications group that was preparing to launch mobile applications for the Blackberry and iPhone that would synchronize with the company’s desktop software. When I arrived, the software was already 3 months late and costing the company both in lost revenue and damaged reputation. With help from the marketing group I established new priorities, set benchmarks for our developers on both platforms, created a reporting system that enabled everyone to see daily progress and delivered the new mobile apps in 45 days. These mobile apps have now been adopted by over 60% of the company’s clients and generated over $150K in revenue.
As the leading software company in the social media space, I can bring the same commitment, organization and structure to your development projects to ensure that you maintain first mover status. How are your new mobile applications coming along?

There. I’ve introduced my primary professional strengths, illustrated how I’ve applied those strengths in a previous position, demonstrated the value of my experience and opened the interview to discuss their specific projects to explore specifically how I can contribute to their business objectives.

And if they want to know about my tennis game, we can chat about it over lunch. After I’m hired.