When asked to "talk about yourself" in a job interview, makes sure to focus on your job strengths and not your personal life, advises career coach Lee Miller.
When an interviewer for a prospective job asks “Tell me about yourself,” it’s not an open invitation to ramble about your life’s history or talk about every job you’ve ever had.
The open-ended question is an opportunity for the candidate to shape strengths and anchor positive traits about themselves, wrote career coach and author Lee Miller in an article for TheLadders Career Avice, “How to Answer the ‘Tell Me About Yourself’ Interview Question.” But most candidates bungle the opportunity, said the former human resources executive for TV Guide.
I almost always began my interviews with candidates by requesting, “Tell me about yourself.” I did that for a number of reasons, the most important of which was to see how the candidates handled themselves in an unstructured situation. I wanted to see how articulate they were, how confident they were and generally what type of impression they would make on the people with whom they came into contact on the job. I also wanted to get a sense of what they thought was important.
(Image by quinn.anya via Flickr, CC 3.0)
More on interviewing:
- 10 Questions to Ask a Recruiter (And 1 to Avoid)
- Why You’re Still Unemployed One Year Later
- Self-Assessment: Are You a Leader By Nature or Nurture?
- The Best Advice for Committee Interviews
- Lunch Interview Tips
Great post.
I think that it’s fairly obvious that with the internet we are still in the ‘wild west’ phase, where no one quite knows what is going on. And it is ‘cooler’ to say things like ‘ditch the resume’ than to give solid advice like you give here. Especially because it can be easier and more fun to add some fancy graphics to your resume rather than do the harder, and more useful, work of tailoring your resume to the specific situation (which I think means not only industry, but company and position).