(You can find my other articles in my Job Hunt Miniseries here.)
Most interviews start with the dreaded question: “Tell me about yourself.” It’s simple but surprisingly complex. How would you describe who you are?
Even worse the interview usually starts with this (unless you are spared a few minutes of your interviewer explaining the role), so you have little to go by about the interviewer as a person to help guide how you might answer. And then, your answer forms your first impression that will shape what he or she thinks of you.
This question is really an opportunity to lay out your self-narrative: your story about who you are and why you are here. Forming a cohesive, motivating self-narrative takes time, so you should prepare this self-narrative beforehand. Everyone stutters through these the first time around, so stumbling through your story ahead of time is much better than doing so during your first few interviews.
Such a narrative ought to use your past experiences in life to explain how you became passionate about the line of work you are currently interviewing for, and this guide explains how to piece together your various experiences in life to form that narrative.
What Makes a Good Self-Narrative
A good self-story functions as the thesis for your entire interview. When you lay an effective foundation with your story, every subsequent question you answer (or even question you ask about the role) is a further clarification of some aspect of your story.
As with most stories, your self-introduction should have three basic components – past, present, and future:
Your self-narrative should use your past experiences to demonstrate that you are passionate about your chosen line of work (and have developed the skills to do that work). You, thus, strive to do that profession in the future.
Here are a few examples of what that might look like:
- “Over the years, I have listened to people and helped them figure out how to realize their dreams and maximize their potential, as a customer service representative, a life coach, and a manager. Now, I would like to continue to do that at an even bigger scale as a regional manager.”
- “Working for many years as a math teacher where I had to figure out how to break down technical concepts for teenagers made me realize how much I enjoy breaking down complex concepts for people from multiple backgrounds and levels of technical expertise. Even though the school environment was not a good fit for me, I still want to use these skills to help decision-makers understand the nuances of the data and make impactful decisions as a data analyst.”
Notice how in each of these, the person explains how their past experiences led to their current passion and then uses their current passion to explain their desired occupation in the future. You can sense who these people are from their story. After this kind of introduction, they can then proceed to explain each detail of their story.
People remember compelling stories. The interviewer is far more likely to remember this candidate and put them among the top of the candidates precisely because they have a clear and compelling story.
How to Craft Your Self-Narrative
The trick is to flesh each of these out separately and then piece them together into a cohesive narrative. Then, shorten that narrative into a concise, couple sentence format that you can now share during an interview.
Start with your past experiences. Think about what you learned from your past. This self-reflection activity does exactly that. If you have not already done this self-reflection, I would strongly recommend you read that link and come back after you have finished it. Here is the short summary for those who have not seen it (those who are already done the activity can jump straight to Step 5):
Summary of Self-Reflection Activity:
Step 1) For each past experience in your life (like a past job or getting a degree), list out what that experience taught you about yourself, what you enjoy doing, and what skills it helped you cultivate.
Step 2) Think about the “life lessons” each taught you about what you would like and not like to do in a job. Write these down.
Examples:
- “I orchestrated a massive project or event, and I never felt so alive as when I was coordinating across multiple stakeholders to get stuff done.”
- “I was a software engineer and realized that I hate programming. I felt stuck sitting in front of the computer all day when I really wanted to talk with more colleagues.”
Step 3) For each lesson, dig deeper into why you enjoyed it or did not enjoy it. For example, a simple statement like “I enjoyed programming” or “I enjoyed managing a team” is okay, but what about that activity did you enjoy? What specific ways did you do it, and were there some aspects of the job that loved and others you did not? Think about why you enjoyed (or did not enjoy) about each past experience, the more you will learn about yourself and the more connections you will make with a future job. It’s best to write these all out.
Step 4) Analyze connections between what you enjoyed across these different activities and what you tended to find annoying or draining. If you write them all out, you can reread your lessons in each life experience and see what they have in common. Some people put each item on separate sticky notes so that they categorize them by grouping lessons with common themes on their desk. I would strongly recommend that if you are able.
Step 5) Now comes the hard part: Synthesize these into a coherent narrative. The goal is to use the past to explain your present state of seeking a new future job. A good place to start would be to fill-in the following story templates:
- “Through X Life Experience(s) [such as a past job, course or degree, etc.], I discovered that I love doing Y [e.g. managing teams, analyzing data, helping to determine strategy, etc.] Thus, I cultivated my skills in that area by doing A, B, and C, and now I want to realize my passion by working as a Z.”
- “X Life Experience taught me Y about myself.”
- If you are making a pivot out of a profession into a new line of work, you may need a contrasting sentence structure like: “I did A but discovered it was not a good fit for me because of X reason. Through it, though, I realized that I am passionate about Y because I enjoy Z, so instead, I would like to do B.”
These are just model sentences. Feel free to use them if they are helpful, but if you would prefer explaining it all in your own words, that is also fine. Do what is most useful for you.
Conclusion
Preparing a self-narrative like this will help propel your interviews to the next level. In the next blog in my series, I will discuss how to refine and practice this self-narrative so that you can give it live in an actual interview conversation.
The remaining sections of this blog provide more detail of what to look for and think about for your future, present, and past sections of your self-narrative, guiding you through the nuances to consider for each.
More Detail on the Different Parts of Your Self-Narrative
Here are more detailed definitions of the future, past, and present components of a self-narrative, an optional final section that some readers may find useful.
Your Desired Future
When walking into an interview, your anticipated future is often the easiest to figure out. By showing up to a job interview, you are indicating that you would like a new job and specifically this job that you are interviewing for. Why else would you show up to the interview? Well even if you have other reasons for showing up, your very presence already communicates this intent.
Because of this, you should think through in more detail what type of job you want to have and type of activities you would like to do in your future job. Instead of just, “I want to have a job with X title”, emphasize what kind of role you would like to fill within the organization and what kind of team you would like to work on. What kind of activities in a potential job make you feel satisfied, and what kind of activities drain you?
Most professions have multiple subtypes. What kind of subtypes do you enjoy working on? Do you enjoy working at an established organization or a startup? What motivates you: success, social impact, innovation, etc.? Do you enjoy trailblazing as the first and only person doing your job in the organization, or do you enjoy optimizing or making more efficient an already established system? The exact types of questions vary by industry, but these are important questions to think about and consider. Reflect on your past experiences to think through what type of role, what type of team to work on, and type of organization work best for you.
Then, figure out what this says about your passion. When you say that you want to work in X field in the future, you are really describing your passion, and the details of what type of role this might look like demonstrate what this passion is. People find drive compelling, and the more detailed you articulate your passion, the more drive they will see you as a person and the more willing and able they will be to help you.
It matters less than might think whether this matches the job you are looking for. If they find you interesting, which they are more likely to if you describe your passion, they may very well form the connections between their job and your passion for you (happens to me surprisingly often). Be clear and compelling about who you are and keep an open mind about the job itself. But if it is absolutely not a good fit, you would be surprised how often, explaining my passion, they tell you that this job is not a good fit, but there is another even more interesting position in their organization that is, and direct you to that. Thus, if you did not accurately explain your passions, you are more likely to follow bad rabbit trails for jobs that would not work for you during your search for a new job.
It’s better in the long run to be yourself and see whether that matches your current job than to try to force yourself to conform to a poor fit of a job. You would have to perform the job everyday for years anyways. The latter is a great way to end up in a soul-sucking job that does not fit you.
Your Past: How You Got Here
To explain your past, you should reflect on what you learned from your past experiences in life. There are two important types of questions to consider:
- What did these life experiences teach you about what you enjoy and do not enjoy doing?
- What skills have you developed to enable you to work on your passions?
Both are important, but most people, when I coach them through this process, tend to focus on the second: the skills you can use to prove their worth as an employee. That makes sense: the job application process often seems focused on what skills you have and whether they match what skills the organization needs.
But, what you enjoy doing and why matters far more for conveying who you are as a person. You are more than a combination of your skills, and even if your interviewer spends most of their time talking about skills, he or she is still a human. Humans are attracted to and understand the world through narratives, and your passions and drive are the cornerstone of your story. They demonstrate the path you would like to blaze down in life, and your skills demonstrate that you have the tools to get there.
When thinking about which life experiences helped you understand what you are passionate about, remember that this includes experiences that led to you to realize what you enjoyed and those that made you learn what you do not enjoy. Both are important to discuss, but I find that focusing on the former tends to work better in the long run. It makes you seem more compelling as a candidate to emphasize what you learned you can do and what you enjoy rather than dwelling on what you dislike doing or are bad at. Even the worst experience taught you something positive about what you enjoyed and/or gave you some relevant skills, so when talking about that experience, focus on that.
This includes transition times, when you are actively transitioning from one profession to another. A narrative like “I used to do X, but I hated it; now I want to do Y instead” focuses on the negative. A better alternative would be something like, “When I worked doing A for many years, I realized that I love X activity or skill, and now I want to do X more even more fully by working in B profession.” That feels noticeably more positive and compelling.
Your Present State in All Its Ambiguities
Of the three, the present is always the shortest time interval. The past and the future can each span years, but the poor present is only ever a single, flickering moment, making it is easy not to give it the focus it needs.
The trick with the present is to consider where you currently are, with all its ambiguities and uncertainties (and the process of finding a new job often feels very ambiguous, precarious, and otherwise stressful). Maybe you are down on your luck and really need a job. Maybe you have a job but are casually considering a career change at some point in the future because it’s not satisfying you.
Whatever your situation, think about how you can use your present moment to attain your future and how you might articulate that. Showing how you are taking action in the present to realize your desired future demonstrates how passionate you are for the future goal. Maybe you are already taking a course in the field you want to work in, going to networking events, incorporating projects in that field into your current work, or using your current relationships to reach out to people in the industry.
What is important for the sake of your self-narrative is to figure out how to convey what you are doing with the present to bring about your future career goals. You can tell them what you are doing now if they help to illustrate who you are, or merely hint at them through an implied sense of urgency to realize your dream. Any sense that you are currently working hard to bring it about will look like an effective and compelling drive, putting you ahead of most lukewarm applicants in their minds.