what's up everyone kenji here and in this video i thought i'd explain what's probably
the most common question in interviews which is just tell me about yourself and it's such
a simple question that in fact it starts to get a bit complicated when you think of
how far back should you take it should you talk about your upbringing what about your
family should you discuss your hobbies and all these other doubts start to come up so in this
video i thought i'd do my best to explain it and thank you to datacamp for sponsoring this video
so i'll break this video down into four main areas firstly we'll look at why this question is so
popular secondly we'll go over the preparation that you should do ahead of the interview
thirdly we'll go over how to structure your answer and then lastly i'll show you a sample
answer that i used when i'm still a student at cornell university applying for an internship at
goldman sachs so why is this question so popular and one of the primary reasons they ask you this
is because they just don't have much background or information about you if a marketing manager
is the one interviewing you his job is actually to market it's not to interview people so that means
that he's probably not looking at your resume and thinking of what questions he should ask
you an hour in advance right maybe a best he or she looks at it for a few seconds instead they're
hoping between meeting rooms doing their work as a marketer right so that's why they need to ask
you this tell me about yourself so they get some context and the cool thing about this interview
question is that it's always at the beginning of the interview so that means that if you
cause a first good impression it's often gonna be lasting but not only are they gonna be impressed
but you're also gonna be a lot more confident going forward with all the other questions too
and here's some quick do's and don'ts for the preparation stage the first point is
to be concise even though there's no official time limit so you only want to say as much as
you need to say to answer a question properly and go no further than that for some people
that might only be 30 seconds while others with a lot of work experience say might take two minutes
but overall if you're going above the three minute mark then it's probably just slightly too long
the second point is that you have full control of what you say in the answer and what i mean by that
is more on the negative side you don't necessarily have to talk about a bad experience in university
or in your previous role you can just omit those so for example if you're a student you don't have
to say that you had all a's up until you've got to see in a calculus class and you're really annoyed
about it or if you're a working professional you don't have to say that my boss just didn't
think i was good enough and that's why i'm switching roles those are things that you don't
necessarily have to say you don't want to tempt the interviewer to ask further into them right
so don't shoot yourself in the foot basically the third point is to practice and just like you would
study for an exam you should probably also prepare for an interview too and because there's such a
high chance of the tell me about yourself question coming up it's definitely worth studying for that
one what i did for instance was to video video record myself and see what kind of hand gestures
i have whether i communicate well how long it takes me to answer a question and so on you can
also practice with friends but knowing my friends they probably would have just laughed at me so i
preferred not to do that the next point is not to memorize and that might be a bit contradictory to
the previous point about practice but overall i really don't think it's a good idea to memorize
at the end of the day the interviewer is looking to get to know you to get to know the real you
not somebody that's rehearsed a couple answers right also one of the big things with memorizing
is that if you get interrupted because say they want to clarify something you mentioned you're
probably going to lose track of whatever you had in mind right so make sure you don't do that
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alright back to the video so moving on to the structure of the answer and the answer that i
recommend has three main steps present past and future formula and i first discovered this method
when i was a student when i was looking through the muse website which is a recruiting website
that i'll be linking in the description as well so this structure basically means that you should
first talk about the present and if you're a working professional that would be your job title
a brief description and maybe some of the key highlights while if you're a student that would be
what year you're in what you're currently studying and maybe some of the projects
that you've undertaken that you think are relevant then in the past section you go over
the experiences that have led you to your current role right so if you're a working professional
that could be your previous work experience your internship experience maybe even your
education while if you're still a student that would probably be your internship experience
some of the leadership roles that you have or your volunteering and lastly the future and here
you want to explain why you're applying to this role what you hope to get out of it and given
your previous experiences why it makes sense to hire you and this is just a general structure it's
by no means the only way to go about it so for example if you have a very impressive feed that
you can't quite fit into the current structure you can obviously modify it slightly so for
example maybe you speak a lot of languages maybe you phone certain sports tournaments that are
very prestigious things like that that maybe you want to mention because you think are impressive
you can obviously modify it accordingly and here's the example answer to tell me about yourself
that i would have given when i was still a student at university applying to a internship
at goldman sachse yes of course so i'm currently a junior at cornell university's business program
where i'm primarily focusing my studies on finance and accounting
two subjects that i've enjoyed quite a lot as my high gpa hopefully shows and among the projects
that i've been involved in that i think are worth highlighting are number one working on creating
valuation models for predicting stock prices in the future that i found really insightful
and number two a public speaking seminar that is hopefully improving my communication skills
now when it comes to my work or internship experience in my first summer of university
i worked as a bellman at emery hotel and even though the job wasn't say particularly glamorous
i did feel like i learned quite a lot when it came to interacting with clients on a daily basis
working as a team and having attention to detail especially because being a five-star hotel
every detail really counted after that in my second summer i wanted a bit more of a
technical role which related more to my coursework so i worked at pwc in their financial audit team
where i was primarily working with excel models in the end i created or updated in between 20
or so different models that had to do with checking if there were any misstatements in
in the client's financials looking forward to this summer i want to combine a bit of the sales and
the people-oriented role of hospitality with more of the technical role of finance and accounting
and i think that investment banking does that so i'm very excited about this interview opportunity
and looking forward to it so something like that will be my answer and by no means is the answer
actually perfect right but among i think the good things that i would highlight there are
that number one my coursework is related to the job so i try to mention that wherever possible
when it comes to the internship or my work experience it is someone related especially pwc
perhaps not so much the mary bellman rule but i try to link it so i say that i also work as a team
i say that i have attention to detail which are all things that bunkers also look for right
and then number three i i try to smile i try to be excited about it wherever possible
at the end of the day they are people too so they want to see someone with some emotion right
as for what i could have done better i'd say that i would have liked to quantify things a
bit more if i could so for instance i would like to say that you know after working at the marriott
hotel i was able to decrease say customer complaints by x percent or something like hey
after working at pwc we were able to increase say customer revenue by x amount obviously i
was just an intern i was there for a short period so i didn't really have that kind of a big impact
but if you do if you have some numbers to show for it definitely make sure to show off
so that's all for this video i hope you found it useful if you did make sure to
hit that like and that subscribe really helps out and hopefully catch you in the next one