Tell me about yourself
That’s the question number one in every interview. It’s not because recruiters doesn’t have imagination. In addition to know your professional background, during your response they can observe your communication skills too.
Said that, it is important to prepare your personal pitch. It will help you to have your speech on the tip of your tongue and to identify your strengths. It will also be useful to improve your LinkedIn profile.
In your pitch, I think it’s important to cover the following points:
- Professional background: area of expertise, years of experience and main qualification;
- Current job and what you are currently doing;
- Main soft and technical skills;
- Some achievement that you are proud.
I’m going to detail each point a little.
Professional background
Talk about your years of experience and your main academic background. Summarize in a short sentence what you have been doing in these years of work.
“Software Engineer with +12 years of experience. Bachelors in Computer Science. I’ve been working as Developer, Tech Lead and even as Founder in several industries like Banking, Credit Services, Health Care and Digital Identity.”
Current job
Summarize your current experience. Which company and what technologies you have been working with. Remember to write about your strengths. Describe which projects and teams you are involved in.
“As Principal Engineer at Itaú, I’m helping the biggest Latin America Bank to scale up global teams and accelerate the digital transformation. Working on mobile banking projects through Latin America, our mission is to guide local Tech Leads and Squads to take the right engineering decisions. Ensuring principles such as maintainability, scalability and security. Promoting the adoption of DevOps culture, Domain-driven design and Test-driven development.”
Soft and technical skills
Name what you believe to be your strengths. Whether they are technical or not. Soft skills, depending on the desired opportunity, are more important than technical skills.
Write a paragraph for each of them, always trying to contextualize this skill inside one of the experiences you’ve lived professionally. It is also worth mentioning skills you are developing.
“I am able to develop multidisciplinary teams, assisting the members to build new competencies.”
“Java architecture specialist, I have +10 years of experience with Spring Boot microservices and legacy Java EE platforms. I’ve been certified Java Programmer since 2007. Now I’m learning modern JVM-based languages: Scala and Kotlin.”
“Passionate about new technologies, for a year I’ve worked with Blockchain technologies (Hyperledger Fabric, Ethereum). Over +4 years I’ve been working with JavaScript Full-Stack (Angular, Node.js, MongoDB) using Docker containers on AWS, OpenShift and Heroku cloud infrastructures.”
Achievements
Learn to value your achievements that are a source of pride. Be sure to use them to your advantage. Talk about how impactful your work has been on society or the company.
It can be a personal project, some volunteer work. It goes from you. Name what makes the most sense for your moment. In my case, I am currently involved with banking.
“During my career I worked on large projects such as the migration of magnetic stripe cards to chip cards in 2010 at one of the largest banks in Brazil. Today the solution avoids frauds, saves millions of dollars per year and provides chip cards for all its customers throughout Brazil. More than 89 millions of clients.”
Conclusion
Building this summary of his professional career, you will have peace of mind to talk about you in an interview. Use it to train your personal speech.
A very important point: be honest. Do not put things that you have no confidence to explain in an interview. Lies are never tolerated.
I always try to keep my speech updated on LinkedIn. If you want to check: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mvsgodinho
