Tell Me About Yourself - Structure a Strong Answer

This is a must read before your next interview, good luck!

While we are in a time when employers want more employees it is good to answer the one question we get from the employer. During the interview we all get the question of  “Tell me about yourself” which in my opinion is by far the most important question to get right during the interview because not only will it set the tone for the rest of the interview, but also you will get a huge confidence boost right at the beginning if you start it off correctly. 

As a career coach I have come to find out while coaching students when they get this question the answer is not what the employer is looking for. If you are like most candidates you start it by telling your life stories when answering the “Tell me about yourself” question. As a leader in my organization while performing an interview this is going to be a boring interviewer at best, and work against you at worst. I hope this article helps you on how to easily answer the interview question: Tell Me About Yourself. 

Click here fore an ultimate Guide To Job Interview Answers 

I provide my honest opinion with some simple steps to structure a strong answer to the “Tell me about yourself” question during an interview. Lets get direct to these three points

1. The Present, Past, and Future answer structure. Interviewers wants to know in order of importance, 

   1. who you are right now, 

   2. how you got to be there, and 

   3. what values you can bring (value added

a.)How to structure the “Present”

This is a snapshot of yourself in your current professional capacity. Timebox this to no more than a minute and you may want to include the followings

1. What do you do in your current role

2. The success metrics you are measured against

3. Recent achievement (something you're proud of)

If you are working professional the present portion might look something like this, “I am currently a Scrum Master with company XYZ leading a scrum team of 9 members building a mobile application. My primary contribution to my team and organization are

1. Encourage continuous improvement while removing impediments 

2. Ensure full participation of all team member

3. help build trust and psychologically safe environment 

4. Communicate team progress with leadership and provide data, and escalate all risk out of the team control.

5. I recently led a newly formed team in becoming more agile and we design, build, test and deliver a client connectivity app on time and on budget. It was tested in the field and the client was able to see return on investment that allowed them to generate more profit and reduce waste in their process. 

6. My leadership team was able to resell the solution to multiple clients generating profit for my organization.

1. If you are a student use the exact same structure above and dive into class projects and the field of studies you are in, internships and leadership experiences. Don't focus too much on the impressiveness level of your story. 

1. How to structure the “Past” portion

Highlight key strengths and takeaways ( now this is when you get to show off, some       things you want the interviews to remember)

1. Identify 2-3 attributes

2. Match your experiences to the attributes

3. Select 1 key moment within each experience to service the highlight of that experience 

If you are a student interviewing for Scrum Master position, your past position might look something like this, “as the business analysis for the process improvement department, “I am responsible for collecting client requirement written in epic feature and user story format  allowing for easy understand of the vision and roadmap and consumption by our software development team. I utilize Jira, AzureDevOps for imputing and tracking requirements and impediments for the teams, facilitate cross team collaboration and solution workshops. Since projects like this  require reporting up to leadership, I took the initiative to learn how to use Jira, or AzureDevOps working closely with my scrum master and agile coach to create dashboards to increase visibility in the tools”.

1. The Highlight Method

   1. This is where you take a small part of the larger story that you have already prepared for and only include that part in the temm me about yourself answer as a highlight. This helps keep your answer concise while mentioning something impressive. Note, if done right, the highlight that you mentioned should trigger the interviewer to ask follow up questions that lead to your large story.  If you have been taking notes up till this point or are still reading, you have already noticed that we’ve been sprinkling in highlights throughout the present past and feature answer structure.

For example the employee connectivity app that led a scrum team to design,  build , test and deliver on time and on budget, is a highlight and you should have the rest of the story prepared using the star format.

1. Providing a sample answers 

So Valery Tell me about yourself. Here is an example that has worked for me and many co-workers here at Facebook.

“Sure, I’m currently a scrum master here at facebook leading 2 scrum teams designing and building a new security mechanism for the whatsapp application. My goal is to build trust within the team and create a safe environment allowing them to be more innovative and be focused on making whatsapp applications to be as secure as possible for the users. 

a.) Specifically my main objective is to build a high performing team that is trusted on delivering high quality applications on time and on projects.

b.) Increase cross team collaboration with buy-in from leadership on the agile ways of working and removing impediments or risk that might impact the team deliverables.

My teams and I have been able to achieve these goals through continuous learning in better understanding the agile values and principles, implementing the practice of lean, Design think and DevSecOp culture.

For example we deliver an MVP of the product that showcases an end to end encryption of all communication and calls within the application on budget meeting the product owner expectations. During development we pivot from a 2 week sprint to a no sprint but a continuous development and integration using Kanban boards for tracking and policies as well as DevSecOp culture and practicing increasing the speed. I made the recommendations after evaluating the team's progress and maturity after three soprints. This change resulted in an increased collaboration, quality design, dev and review of code and faster delivery. Before working as a Business analyst I was a project coordinator for the Development and Operational teams for new product development. Since that was a nice experience to have, I was able to use what I learned as a coordinator to be a better servant leader. I have created onboarding material for new scrum masters and write blog articles to help those interested in getting into the field which you can find here.

So whether you are new to the field you are about to get into e.g an agile Scrum Master or product owner, for a new college graduate or an experienced professional looking for an answer structure, I hope this article is a great resource for you and you can get more in this  Ultimate Guide To Job Interview Answers.

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