Tell Me About Yourself Example 1

Tell Me About Yourself

Employers ask this question because they want to know you have the relevant educational and professional experiences and skill-sets to excel at the role you’ve applied to and want to gain a strong understanding of why that role appeals to you.

“Tell Me About Yourself” Answer Outline (geared towards undergraduate students, modify as needed depending on the years of professional experience you have and the role you)

Step One | The Introduction: Quickly introduce yourself. Mention your name, the school you attend, the year you’re currently in, and your concentration of study. *If you are an international candidate, you can mention from where and when you moved to the U.S. here.*

Step Two | Passion for Industry: What made you interested in the industry you’re applying to? Why do you gravitate towards it?

Step Three | Professional Experiences: What have you done and what have you learned? How have those experiences influenced the progression of your career journey?

Step Four | Present Day: What about the company and/or role you are interviewing for excites you?

Winning Strategies

• Connect your professional experiences together and logically explain how one experience led to the other
• Be specific! Talk about your passion for the industry/product group you are interviewing for
• Demonstrate that you have the mindset/skill-sets to excel in the role you have applied to

Avoid

• Reading or listing the bullet points on your resume -- your interviewer can read and you aren’t adding anything new or anything of value by doing this
• Spending too much time highlighting extracurriculars or non-essential role accomplishments; you are communicating that you don’t understand the requirements of the role you’re interviewing for.

Detailed Sample Answer

Hi, my name is Mike and I’m currently a Junior at UC Berkeley majoring in both electrical engineering and finance.

Ever since I was young, I’ve always had a natural ability for working with numbers and breaking down complex problems into smaller component parts. Engineering has helped me further develop this analytical approach, but I’ve always looked to finance, my passion since starting college, as a much more practical application of this mindset.

I got my first taste of finance through a stock market competition in my Valuations class in my freshman year and I was instantly hooked. I enjoyed looking at data and performing analysis to try and figure out where the market was headed – I found it really flexed my quantitative skills which I found to be really rewarding!

I got my first exposure to finance in the professional world as a corporate finance intern at Intel, the computer chip company. I performed a variety of tasks, including performing financial analysis on equity returns for potential investments and updating financial models to support quarterly deal evaluation. It was a great learning experience that solidified my desire to further develop my investment skill-sets and my interest in finance within the tech space.

Last summer I worked as an analyst at [FIRM X] in equity research, leveraging my engineering knowledge and passion for electronics to cover the technology sector. I got hands-on experience doing everything from performing competitive analysis research for a high-speed semiconductor product to using a Bloomberg terminal to gather data to calculate P/E and ROA ratios for tables that were used in research reports. I also got a chance to utilize my writing chops, creating multiple articles ultimately used by analysts for their own research.

While I found the experience in equity research quite rewarding, I realized at this early stage in my career, I don’t want my experiences and learnings to be limited to one sector. Additionally, my conversations with a few investment bankers I worked with at [FIRM X] made me realize that working on live deals and the transactional nature of investment banking -- facilitating an acquisition or raising capital for an IPO -- is much more appealing and exciting to me.

It’s for this reason I’m here today to interview for the investment banking summer analyst position at [FIRM Y]. I truly believe your firm is a leader in the [XXX] space, especially after leading the successful IPO’s of [Company A] and [Company B], and will prove to be a great training ground that will bring out the best in my abilities. I look forward to sharing more about my passion for the role and the value I can add to [FIRM Y].

Why Is This a Good Answer?

• There is structure ( the answer is not all over the place)!
• There are logical transitions from one experience to another — the interviewer has understood the candidate is purposeful in his or her career moves. The whole point of this answer is to provide the “context behind the bullet-points”, i.e. why did you choose to pursue a certain path or role.
• The answer just contains high-level highlights and learnings and no mentions of specific bullet-points. If your interviewer has a question about a specific bullet-point, they will ask you a follow-up questions, but avoid going over bullet-point by bullet-point in your answer AT ALL COSTS!