Nothing more uncomfortable than an unexpected (or too open) question in a job interview.
“Tell me about yourself” is an expression that some interviewers may use to break the ice.
The problem is that not all job applicants take it as an opportunity to highlight what they consider most relevant about their work experience and personal skills.
For some, it can be a really intimidating question when they don’t have a little script prepared that allows them to convince to the interviewer that they fit the profile that the company is looking for.
Therefore, experts advise, it is always worth having a brief speech about yourself prepared that can be used to transform it into an opportunity any broad questions.
And although the challenge is knowing what to say, you also have to know how to say it.
“It is difficult to answer this question because that requires a great capacity to summarize our life and our careers in a few sentences”, Melody Wilding, an American labor consultant, tells BBC Mundo
It is especially hard for those people who have played very different roles and whose skills come from different work fields.
And it is also difficult for people who do not have the ability to concentrate on the most important issues, getting carried away by a sea of thoughts and memories without a clear thread conductor that gives meaning to the story.
“People feel a lot of pressure to try to impress the interviewer with the answer and it is that pressure that makes them nervous and does not allow them to think clearly”, says Wilding.
Getty ImagesWhen an interviewer asks that question, he adds, habitu He is basically looking for a summary of your experience and the value you have generated during your career.
That is to say, he not only wants to know what positions you have held in other companies, but he is interested in knowing what results you’ve got. In a few words, what have been your successes.
The 3 steps
According to Wilding, it is advisable to start by thanking you for the opportunity you have been given with the interview and add that you are very interested in working in that position.
The second step is to summarize the highest points of your professional career.
For example, “in the last five years I have been in charge of the development of technological projects in companies such as X and X, whose market capitalization is greater than X”.
These types of phrases give the input to describe the achievements being in those positions.
“While I was in such a company, I designed and led the practice a strategy that generates or income for an amount close to X in just X months”.
In this example, the essential thing is to make clear the result of your actions and not just describe your actions. But in addition, it is important that the results are quantifiable.
It is not enough to say that you were in charge of improving a process. What you should say is that your work was so effective that it allowed you to achieve a specific result.
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Having finished listing the results of your achievements, you can refer to your skills from a more comprehensive point of view, explaining what you have learned to do in your years of experience.
Normally the titles by themselves do not necessarily explain the importance of what you have achieved, nor do they show what challenges you managed to overcome.
At this point it is important to look for how to distinguish yourself from the other candidates.
At the end you can add something more personal or fun rtido.
A client, says Wilding, “told me at the end of the answer: ‘And, well, I’m the worst guitarist in the world.’ Those things, at the right time, can work well”, because they help you establish a connection with the interviewer and mention a couple of things about your hobbies or your family.
“What you should never do”
“What you should never do is make the answer too long“, says Wilding.
The great challenge, he explains, is to tell everything that is important in less than two minutes.
And if you have skills to summarize, he adds, “the ideal thing would be to do it all in one minute”.
One of the worst ways to answer the question “tell me about yourself”, is to go back in time and recount it chronologically, such as “I entered university in year X, then I changed my career and my first job was…”.
An eternal response and in chronological order is a recipe for getting out of the situation badly.
“No start with the beginning of your career, on the contrary, focus on the highlights of what you have done”, says the consultant.
In addition to the content The way you say things is very important. Wilding points out that the tone of the voice is key to demonstrating confidence and that it is worth rehearsing what you are going to say.
“The bridge technique”
When we do not know how to answer a question, the “bridge technique” can be very useful in a job interview.
Basically, it’s about turning the conversation the other way in a subtle way.
If they ask you about the mountains, and you really dominate the subject of the oceans, then the fun is in looking for the most ingenious way to establish a connection between two topics that seem disconnected.
Make the bridge (what in English means “bridge”) is precisely to connect two topics to finally talk about what you want to talk about because it is an area where you handle yourself well.
“It took me a while to figure it out until I finally got it” , Wilding account.
“Tell me about yourself” is not the only question that can be challenging, he adds, especially when is formulated at the beginning of the conversation.
Other questions for which it is also good to have some type of answer prepared are, for example, where do you see yourself in five more years? unique?, why should I hire you?, or what is your greatest weakness?.
Sometimes, says the expert, interviewers are not necessarily looking for a correct answer.
Rather they are trying to discover what is your way of facing something unknown and what kind of reasoning you are able to do to deal with something new.
If they ask you “imagine that you have got this position. What would you do in the first 36 days of your management?”, they are probably not expecting you to have a detailed plan of everything you are going to implement.
But they are interested in your ability to analyze and the different scenarios that you can come up with with the little information you have.
In In these types of cases, it’s a good idea to cite how you’ve solved challenges in the past.
Although it is not the same context, it allows you to show that you have overcome obstacles and that, just as you did before, you can do it now.