It is the only interview question you can be certain you'll be asked. Most people answer it by narrating their resume from the top, which throws away the one moment where you get to choose what the conversation is about.
"Tell me about yourself" is not an information request. The interviewer has your resume open in the other window. They are not sitting there hoping to learn where you went to university.
What they're doing is three things at once: starting the conversation somewhere easy, checking whether you can explain your own work coherently, and listening for a reason to believe you fit this role. The third one is the part that's actually being scored, and it's the part most answers never touch.
There's a mechanical reason to take this seriously. Interviewers follow up on what you just said — it's the only material they have. Whatever you spend your opening minute on becomes the agenda for the next ten. Spend it on your dissertation and you will spend the next stretch discussing your dissertation. You are choosing the topic, so choose deliberately.
The structure: present → relevant past → why this role
Three beats, in this order. The order matters more than the wording, because it front-loads the thing the interviewer can use.
Present — about 15 seconds
Start with what you are now, in one sentence: current title, the kind of work, one detail of scope. Scope is what stops it being generic — "I'm a product designer" is a category, "I'm a product designer on a payments team, mostly working on the checkout flow" is a person.
If you're between jobs, frame it around what you do, not what you're missing. "I'm a supply chain analyst — I spent four years at a mid-size retailer and I'm looking for my next role" is complete. Do not apologise for a gap in your first sentence. You've handed the interviewer the objection before they'd even thought of it.
Relevant past — about 30 seconds
This is where the answer usually collapses, because people turn it into a chronology. It is not a chronology. It's a selection. Pick one or two things from your history that make the case for this particular job and skip everything else — including things you're proud of, including your longest role if it isn't the relevant one.
The test for each sentence: if the interviewer replied "and that matters here because…?", do you have an answer? If not, cut the sentence. You have about four sentences total, so each one has to be earning its place.
Why this role — about 15 seconds
Close by connecting your past to their opening, out loud and explicitly. This is the sentence most candidates leave out, apparently assuming the connection is obvious. It isn't, and an interviewer who has to construct your argument for you often doesn't bother.
One clause of real specificity does more here than a paragraph of enthusiasm. "You're building the analytics function out from scratch, and that early stage was the part I liked most in my last role" says something. "I've always admired your company's innovative culture" says you read the homepage.
The first sentence sets the agenda
❌ So, I grew up in Manchester, did my A-levels there, then went to university in Leeds and studied business, and after graduating I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do, so…
✅ I'm an operations analyst — for the last three years I've worked on demand forecasting, which is the part of this role that made me apply.
On length
Don't estimate this from the page — read your draft aloud with a timer and find out how long your own version of a minute is. Almost everyone runs longer out loud than they expect, because you add words in the room that aren't in the draft. Write to about 70 seconds in practice and you'll land near 60 in the interview.
Worked example 1: changing industries
Situation: eight years in retail operations, applying for an operations manager role at a logistics software company. The risk is being filed as "retail person" in the first ten seconds and never getting out of that box.
I've spent the last eight years in retail operations — most recently I ran fulfilment for a 40-store chain, so I owned inventory accuracy, the warehouse team, and the systems connecting the two. The part I ended up specialising in was software rollouts. We replaced our warehouse management system two years ago and I led the pilot, the training and the cutover across all 40 sites, which took [X months] and touched every person in the operation.
That project is genuinely why I'm sitting here. I spent it on calls with the vendor's implementation team thinking I'd rather be on their side of the table — the problems were more interesting, and I could see where the product was making our lives harder in ways their team couldn't see from the outside. So I'm looking to move into logistics software in a role where the operational background is an asset rather than something I'm leaving behind. That's what caught my eye about this one: you're hiring an ops manager who has actually run a warehouse, not just built software for one.
Look at what the structure is doing. Eight years of retail get one sentence — enough to establish credibility, not enough to define him. The middle picks exactly one thread, the system rollout, because that thread is the bridge to the new industry. Everything else in eight years is left out.
The last section does two jobs. It names the fit explicitly instead of hoping the interviewer infers it, and it volunteers the motivation before anyone asks "so why are you leaving retail?" Answering the obvious objection on your own terms is much better than answering it defensively twenty minutes later.
Worked example 2: new graduate
Situation: final-year statistics student applying for a junior data analyst role at a healthcare company. The risk is that with nothing but coursework, the answer turns into a list of modules.
I finished a statistics degree in June, and the part I got most invested in was messy real-world data rather than clean problem sets. My final project was with the university's transport office — they had three years of bike-share data nobody had opened, and I built the cleaning pipeline and a dashboard showing which docking stations ran empty and when. They moved two stations this year based on it.
Alongside that I did a six-month part-time placement at a small insurance broker, which was mostly SQL and a lot of explaining numbers to people who don't like numbers — and it turned out I quite enjoy that second part. So I'm looking for a first analyst role somewhere the analysis actually gets used for something rather than filed. This one sits inside the clinical operations team rather than a central data function, which is specifically why I applied for it and not the general graduate scheme.
No module list. No grade. Two concrete things — one project, one placement — and both are described by what happened, not what was studied. "They moved two stations this year based on it" is worth more than any coursework summary, because it's an outcome outside the university.
The last sentence does something small and effective: it names a specific detail from the job posting. It's proof of attention that costs one clause and is very hard to fake.
Four ways this goes wrong
- Reciting the resume top to bottom. They already have it. You're spending your best minute reading them a document they can read faster themselves, and chronology forces you to give your least relevant job the same airtime as your most relevant one.
- Starting at birth. Hometown, school, degree, first job, second job. By the time you reach anything that bears on this role, the minute is gone and so is the interviewer's attention. Start from now and go backwards only as far as your argument needs.
- Running four minutes. The most common failure by a distance. Nobody will interrupt you — they'll just stop listening, and you'll have spent your goodwill before question two. If you notice you're well past a minute, land the plane: finish the sentence, add your "why this role" line, stop. Silence afterwards is fine. Let them ask.
- Rehearsing until it's recited. Memorising word for word gives you a flat delivery and no recovery path — lose your place and you have nothing. Learn the three beats and the two or three facts inside each, then say it aloud six or eight times, slightly differently every time.
There's a clean diagnostic for over-rehearsal: can you be interrupted? If a follow-up question halfway through derails you completely, you've memorised a speech instead of learning an argument. A good self-introduction survives being interrupted at any point, because you know what you're claiming and why.
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Recruiter screen vs hiring manager
Same three beats, different emphasis, because the two people are trying to establish different things.
A recruiter is usually checking you against a shortlist of hard facts: level, location, notice period, salary range, and whether you can describe your work to someone who isn't in your field. So strip the jargon. No internal system names, no acronyms only your last company used. Say your level plainly, and make the "why this role" line about the job as advertised, since that's the version they know. If there's an obvious logistical question — you're relocating, you have a three-month notice period — answering it inside your minute saves everyone a round of email.
A hiring manager already knows the domain. They're listening for whether you think about the work the way their team does. This is where you go one layer deeper: name the actual tools, the actual scale, the specific hard problem you dealt with. Keep the present sentence shorter to buy room for it. And make the closing line about their team or product specifically rather than the company brand — you're now talking to the person who owns the problem.
If you've already given the story to two people at the same company, assume it was passed along. Don't repeat it verbatim in the final round; shift the emphasis to whatever the earlier conversations suggested they're unsure about.
Build yours in twenty minutes
- Write the last sentence first — the "why this role" line. If you can't write it honestly, that's useful information about the application, not a writing problem.
- Pick the one or two past items that support it. Everything else in your career comes out. This is the hard step and it's the whole exercise.
- Write the present sentence: what you are now, the kind of work, one detail of scope.
- Read it aloud with a timer. Cut until it lands under 70 seconds. Cut adverbs first, then whole sentences.
- Say it once to another person. The parts you stumble over are usually the parts you don't quite believe, and those are the parts to rewrite.
Twenty minutes of work covers every interview you have this month, with only the final sentence swapped each time. It is the highest-return preparation available, precisely because it's the one question you know is coming.
This post was originally published on ResuHive.
