So tell me about yourself.

The most common job interview question of all time.

Usually the thing that they ask you first as an icebreaker when you first sit down at your job interview.

Now there are a million ways to answer this open-ended question and there's also about a million Youtube videos out there giving you various ways to answer it.

But today, I'm going to go give you the quickest, simplest, best way I've seen to answer this question.

Okay, let's look at this thing from the other side of the fence.

Let's look at it from the perspective of the recruiter or hiring manager.

Usually when you post the position, you get a lot of responses and you may well end up with, especially these days, with over 100 candidates applying for the position.

So for you, this is an elimination game.

Your job is to go from 100 applications down to one candidate that you select.

Now from the perspective of the job seeker who's being interviewed, you don't know the criteria they used to eliminate people.

Oh, sure there's posted requirements for the position, but the problem is, more than one person may meet all posted requirements.

So there's often a hidden criteria that they don't tell you of what will get you eliminated or hired.

For example, something I've seen in the past is a hiring manager who's a fan of a particular sports team and if you happen to volunteer that you're a fan of the opposing sports team,

that may be grounds to eliminate you on the fact that you might not be a good "fit", and this does happen.

Now we're going to make one assumption here and that is that they've actually read your resume.

If you apply for a position and you send in your resume and then they later receive it and then call you in for an interview, usually that means that they've read your resume.

Not always, I have seen cases where that hasn't actually occurred, but in the vast majority of cases, we can assume this to be true.

So what does this mean? This means that the content on your resume is safe.

Everything you've written on there did not result in you getting eliminated.

So it's safe content to use and we're gonna be coming back to that.

Now when you get asked, "tell me about yourself" in a job interview, this is what you do.

Sart off by saying, "Well, as you can see from my resume," That's the first thing you say.

Then go down your resume in chronological order, starting with the oldest material and then getting closer to the present and finally talking about your most recent experience.

This should take about 45 seconds, no more than a minute.

Then end with the phrase, "And that's what brings me here today and why I'm excited to learn more about this opportunity."

You see, your purpose in a job interview is to communicate to the person interviewing you, how you're the person for the job, how you meet all the qualifications.

That's your purpose in the interview.

You don't want to waste your time talking about something you did 15 years ago that has absolutely nothing to do with this position, and it's just taking up time.

That's why you want to summarize your resume in 45 seconds to a minute. No more than that, really.

See, it's a well known fact that people absorb and retain only a small proportion of what they hear.

It's like a very small percentage of what you hear that you actually understand and retain and can recall Later.

So that's why you want to mention more than once how you meet all the qualifications. You want to make sure it registers.

So when you get the question "Tell me about yourself",

all you have to do is say, "Well, as you can see from my resume," and then you summarize your resume in about 45 seconds to a minute.

Maybe start with your education, start with your oldest experience and then come up chronologically to the present where you end with your most recent experience.

And then you end with the phrase "...and that's what brings me here today, and why I'm excited to learn more about this opportunity."

So you want to spend as much time as possible talking about this opportunity, not stuff you've done in the past.

That's why it's very important to try and steer the conversation from something you've done years ago to get them to talk about this position so you can explain how you meet the requirements.

So this is actually part of a new YouTube series I'm doing, I'm going to go through all the common job interview questions and we're gonna talk about the hiring process in general.

I actually teach this at a post graduate level and I've been on both sides of it, hiring and being hired.

So hopefully that will be useful for you.

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So once again, I'm Bill, the company's expert.

Thank you so much for being here and watching my videos.

You're awesome.