Important Things When You Answering “Tell Me About Yourself”

Important Things When You Answering “Tell Me About Yourself”

Today we’re going to talk about how to answer that interview question which tells us a little bit more about yourself so when the interviewer asks you that one of the things they’re looking for right at the beginning is just how easily you’re able to describe yourself and present yourself.  So you want to make sure that you’re confident about talking about yourself – so you might need to practice it at home a few times before you actually go into the interview room. A lot of us don’t like talking about ourselves but in this particular instance. You just need to give a little introduction about yourself and be confident when you do that.   You want to be aware of your interests and your skills and be able to put across a few of them right at the beginning there in that interview. 

So first of all you’re going   to give a very general overview and you can start off with something along the lines of:   “well as you can see from my cv, I currently work in this particular position.”  And so you just want to go through the basics of what’s already there on your CV – a general overview.   And one of the things that you can add to this is: “I’ve chosen this career because I have a specific   interest in x.”   For example,

You might want to say: “In my current position you can see from my CV  that I’m the finance manager at such and such company.  I chose finance   because I’ve got a real love of numbers and understanding the markets and how they change.”  

Make sure that you add your interests and how they actually link in with what you do.  They want to find out that you’re enthusiastic about what you do so make sure you get that across even if you’re not enthusiastic about what you do. And so once you’ve done that you want to then move into a specific example of yourself and something that you’ve done recently that links in with what they’re looking for in the role that you’re applying for.   For example

you’ve given a general overview and say ‘I work for this organization’ ‘I chose this career because I’m interested in this’ and now you’re going to say “most recently”   or “quite recently I worked on a project which I was really interested in because it allowed me   to put forward my ideas and lead on a project.” “I really enjoy being a leader because I enjoy   inspiring others and putting forward my own ideas for things.” 

You want to give a really concrete example of something that you’ve really done that matches the skills they want, and that you enjoy so it’s linking your interests and your skills to something that they want from you. Just one specific example – no more.  They’re going to delve much further into your skills probably later on in the interview and so you don’t want to be reeling off a pre-memorized list of skills at this point.   But you do want to just give one example of something that you’ve done recently that links your interests and your skills to something that they want. Once you’ve done that you can finally move into your personal interests. 

Now with your personal interests, you don’t want to get too personal but you do want to give across a bit of an impression about who you are and why you might be a nice person to work with, for example. When people are looking at other people and meeting new people, one of the first things they’re looking for is: can they trust that person? Trust is proven by research to be one of the key primal drivers that people are looking for in others.  They want to look at you as a trustworthy person and also just someone that they can get on with and enjoy working within a team.  So if you can get those things across from your personal interests then that’s going to be a real plus.  If you have got some nice concrete interests of things that you’re involved in that might look quite impressive to them then here’s the time to get those things out and mention them. For example, it could be:  “I really enjoy running   and I recently ran a 10k race to raise money for a charity.” That shows that you’re someone who’s motivated and sporty, which is always a good trait to have in any role, and also it shows that you’ve got a kind aspect to you which a company will like. It doesn’t have to be sporting related but it could be that you’re part of a community project, you’re part of a book club, a gardening club, a language exchange club, you play the guitar or whatever. It is trying to get those interests across and try to kind of angle them from the point of view of being a skill or the point of view of them being something that demonstrates key attributes that they want.

 Now if you don’t have any particular interests that look particularly impressive, and one of your favorite things is watching TV, you might want to leave that aspect out of it but try and think of something perhaps that you’ve done in your past that you enjoyed that you can reel in.  For example, if you’ve been on a hiking trip a few years ago then you could perhaps try and angle that and say: “I do enjoy hiking sometimes. ” “We did a trip a while ago where we climbed a really tall mountain and I worked hard to achieve that and spent some months training for it.” So that was a real achievement. So if you can’t think of a general ongoing volunteer or activity or hobby that you have that’s a bit impressive, then try to come up with an example from the past of something you’ve done.  And you could try and angle that a little bit to be an interest.  If you can keep general things out of it like TV, music and that kind of thing but if you have nothing else to say, then, by all means, include them and say “Well I enjoy listening to music” – and give the specific type of music: “I like is this and the reasons why I enjoy it is because it relaxes me” or something like that. For each personal thing about yourself that you’re going to mention, only elaborate on it for a couple of sentences – don’t go in deep into a hobby and kind of over-indulge yourself by going on and on about the particular interest that you’ve got. Just mention a couple of things about it: “I do this, I like it because of that.”  That’s enough and do keep family including children and spouses out of the conversation. Often interviewers really don’t want to hear that, and they certainly shouldn’t be asking about it. So keep that stuff out if you can. Here are three things:

1. You’re going to give a general   overview and you’re going to say “I’ve chosen this career because I enjoy this” and then

2. You’re going to give a more specific example of something you’ve done recently that you really enjoyed and how that interests and skills match the interests and skills that they’re looking for in the job.

3. You’re going to move on to your personal interests and you’re going to keep it brief and try to describe one or two things and why you enjoy them – and if you can, try and link it to something that you know that they’re looking for in their job spec.