Cracking the interview icebreaker question

Your time to introduce yourself is your best chance to impress and steer the conversation with your interviewer.

“Tell me a bit about yourself” is very often how it goes. Icebreaker questions are mainly aimed at getting the conversation started. The interviewer is likely meeting you for the first time. As humans, we need something to get a conversation started, and in the setting of an interview, an apt thing is for the persons present, to introduce themselves.

While the words about themselves from the interviewers are good for you to know who you are speaking to, your introduction is really the one that matters most. What you say in response to this question can help steer the conversation in your favor, and create an amazing impression to start off with.

Before getting into deciding what you want to talk about, first think about the context of the question. What type of interview round is it? Leadership? phone screening? Coding challenge? Depending on what the interview round is for, your answer to introducing yourself will help set up the mood and the next actions/questions.

If it is a coding challenge interview, the interviewer is very unlikely to know a lot about you, but just a bit about who you are at this stage of life.

If it is a leadership round, the interviewer is likely going to go deep into certain aspects of your career and experiences from your introduction. So structuring it accordingly will help a lot.

If it is a first screening round, you need to understand that the person on the other side is going to take a lot of notes, and also be evaluating your answers against certain parameters they already have in place. The typical phone screening round is often about checking if the interviewee ticks off certain “very high level” metrics for the job. The person on the other side is also highly unlikely to be an expert in your domain (like technology, programming, marketing, etc). Focussing on keywords, and taking it slow helps the interviewer maintain a tap on what you are saying, and ticking off checklist items on their side.

It is generally safe for you, at this time to assume 2 things:

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