“Tell me about yourself”, is a question that almost everyone asks in an interview, especially if the interview is one-on-one. The only time I wasn’t asked this question was a panel interview with four other people in the room. Despite being one of the most common interview questions, it almost always stumps people who are new to interviewing or who haven’t interviewed in a while. 

The open-endedness of the question is what makes it so difficult to answer, so you must have a strategy and practice answering this common interview question.

Table of Contents

1. Why Interviewers Ask This Question
2. General Strategy
3. Things You Should Do
4. Things You Should Avoid
5. Example Answers
6. Alternative Versions Of This Question

Why Interviewers Ask This Question

There are multiple reasons why an interviewer asks this question.

• It serves as a great transition from initial small talk into the actual interview.  
• It also serves as a basis for branching off into the rest of the interview. This creates a conversational flow that is the hallmark of a good interview.
• It is an effective way to get to know you quickly.

But regardless of the reason, one thing is almost certain; your interviewer will ask you the question.

General Strategy

You’ll want to follow a general strategy of present, past, and future.

If you’ve written your resume with a reverse-chronological listing of your positions, then the initial flow will likely be obvious. You’ll first speak about your current position or your most recent position if you are currently unemployed. Then you’ll work your way back to discuss previous work.  

The part that people often forget though is to end the answer by talking about the future. You want to explain why you are sitting down with them for an interview.  

Things You Should Do

Make a great first impression.  This is likely the very first question the interviewer will ask you. So you have to make sure you nail it. A great answer here will set the proper tone for the rest of the interview.

Tailor your answer to the role.  If you’ve been a customer service representative for a healthcare company and a bank, but you are applying for another bank, you should focus on the bank position. Similarly, if you’re applying for a management position, but you’ve also held front line positions, focus on the management experience in your resume.

Be Concise.  Don’t spend 20 minutes answering the interviewer’s very first question. They want a brief answer, not a full cataloging of your career and achievements. There will be time later to talk about everything they feel is important. Also, it is better to have an interviewer respond by saying, “can you tell me a little bit more about your time at company X” than it is to make them say, “I think we’ve got the idea, let’s move on.”

Practice.  This is true for most things where you want to perform well; you need to practice. You aren’t trying to remember answers word for word. Your goal is to have the answer sound natural and also state everything you want to say. If you start sounding like a robot, stop for a little while. Read something or watch some Netflix. Then come back and give the answer another try. You’ll likely sound 100% better than you did before the break.

Tailor your answer to your audience.  As you go through the interview process, you’ll likely interview with multiple people: a recruiter, the hiring manager, the hiring manager’s boss, etc. The interviews will also likely be of different lengths. The hiring manager will probably be an hour, but the recruiter could be 15 to 30 minutes. You shouldn’t give the same answer to this question to each interviewer.

A recruiter is trying to determine if you can do the job and doesn’t want to spend a long time listening to your answers. You’ll want to be brief and focus on highlighting items from the job posting.

For the hiring manager, in addition to figuring out if you can do the job, they are going to care about team fit and personality as well. You can give a longer answer and also inject more personality.

Preparing both a long and a short version will serve you well across multiple interviews.  

Focus on positives. For the most part, negatives have no place in your interview answers, unless you are directly asked about them, such as what is your greatest weakness or tell me about a time you failed. The interviewer’s lack of knowledge about you at the beginning of the interview will amplify the effect of any negatives you provide. So don’t include them. If you were laid off or fired, avoid talking about that until the interviewer directly asks you.

Things You Should Avoid

Don’t just read your resume.  This tends to happen when someone is unprepared for the question. The candidate blanks on the answer and starts reading their resume. While that is likely better than 5 minutes of awkward silence, followed by the interviewer thanking you for your time and walking you out the door, it isn’t going to get you the job either. Thankfully, if you followed all of the coachings in this article, you’ll be more than ready to give a great answer.

Don’t get too personal. Don’t talk about race, religion, politics, or family. These topics can be a turnoff for managers who may hold different opinions from you. Also, they rarely add anything to the conversation. There are exceptions, of course, if you work in a directly related field. For instance, if you are applying to work with children who have special needs, mentioning that you too have a child with special needs could be seen as an advantage over other candidates who don’t have that same real-world experience. So consider this to be a general rule and use your best judgment on when to ignore it.

Example Answers

Example 1

I’m currently a customer service specialist with Acme Medical Insurance. I’ve worked there for about five years and have learned so much. Working in customer service has taught me a lot about what goes wrong in various departments and a lot about the customer experience in this industry. Before that, I spent two years as a customer service specialist for a car insurance company. But I found that I prefer the medical field because I enjoy how meaningful the work can be to the customers’ health and well-being. I want to find a company where I can leverage the perspective and experience I’ve gained, which is why I’m looking to move into the health plan operations department as a health plan operations specialist.

Example 2

I’ve been in the industry for ten years. Most recently, I was a manager of Accounting for Acme Accounting firm, where I managed a team of 6 CPA’s. We serviced three different external business, handling all of their accounting needs. Before that, I was an accounting manager for Acme Health Products. My team did similar work, but it was all internal to the company rather than external clients. These have all been relatively small companies, under $10 million in revenue, but they allowed me to grow and develop myself. I’ve always wanted to work for a larger company of your caliber, which is why I’m interested in joining your team.

Alternative Versions Of This Question

• Walk me through your resume.
• Tell me more about your career journey.
• Tell me about your background.

For more interview questions and answers, check out our Guide to Common Job Interview Questions.