How to Answer “Tell Me About Yourself”

How good is your answer to “tell me about yourself” really?

Your ability to answer that question is a skill on its own. And, like any skill, we can gauge our mastery of it via the 4 stages of competence:

🤷‍♂️ You don’t know what you don’t know (unconscious incompetence)

Your answer is unfocused or even rambling. It’s likely full of irrelevant or generic details and doesn’t tell the listener who you are, what value you bring, and why you’re interested in the role.

To get out of this stage, you’ll want to get constructive feedback from others, practice it in mock interviews, and even record yourself and listen back to it. The key we’re after here is SELF-AWARENESS.

🤔 You know what you don’t know (conscious incompetence)

Your answer may come across as awkward and lack fluidity; e.g. it feels rehearsed and more mechanical than natural. You may also over or underexplain yourself.

Moving on from this stage is a matter of COMMUNICATION. Practice your answer over and over again until it’s clear and concise on who you are, what value you bring, and why you’re interested in the role. The more you practice it, the more you’ll be able to adjust wording on the fly, ideally towards how you actually speak, which then makes it a lot less robotic/scripted sounding.

👍 You know what to do, but it takes effort (conscious competence)

At this point, your answer to “tell me about yourself” is well-organized with a clear beginning, middle, and end (again, who you are, what value you bring, why you’re interested). It also will lace in specific skills or experiences that directly relate to the position.

To ultimately master “tell me about yourself,” you need to refine your fluidity and tone. With enough practice, you’ll become able to consistently deliver a clear and concise answer to the question. Naturally, the key here is CONFIDENCE.

💪 You know what to do and it’s on auto-pilot (unconscious competence)

When you’ve mastered your answer to “tell me about yourself,” you’re able to communicate who you are, your value, and your interest in so many different ways… yet each is consistently confident, clear, and concise.

If you’re at this point, congratulations, you’ve mastered the answer to “tell me about yourself!

So, let’s sum it all up:

To get from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence, you need SELF-AWARENESS.

To get from conscious incompetence to conscious competence, you need to practice COMMUNICATION.

And to get from conscious competence to unconscious competence, you must be CONFIDENT.

🏆 If you have all 3, then you’ve got what it takes to answer “tell me about yourself” better than 90% of them candidates out there (+10 points if you got that reference)!