We have all heard this question before in many different situations — a coffee chat, a job interview, or even a first date. It’s a fantastic opportunity to talk about yourself and set up the rest of the convo well. At the same time, it’s also easy to feel like you did not get the most out of the opportunity.
It’s important to think about these conversations as your personal elevator pitch. To do that successfully you want to start have a clear objective in mind. What is it you want the other person to leave the conversation with? Even if they your CV (or your social profiles) they will leave the conversation with a certain impression that they will tell others about (eg the hiring manager). Your goal must be to make it easy as possible for them to tell your story in the best possible way.
To make sure you are ready to tell others about yourself and leave the impression you want to leave, I developed an easy method to prepare you and make sure you are pretty much always ready to have such a conversation with the desired outcome.
Let’s break it down into 5 simple steps.
Step 1) Build a repository of things you are proud off
Take a blank sheet of paper and go through all your career stages — you may even want to go all the back to school or your youth — and list down everything that comes to mind about that stage in your life that you are proud of:
- 1st job: “Exceed quota in my first 2 years of being an ad sales professional”
- University: “Graduated with honours” or “Worked 2 jobs while studying to pay for tuition”
- High School: “part of the award winning choir” or “Editor of school newspaper”
- Teenager: “Passionate football player”
The key is to really list down everything and not be super selective (that’s for later). You are building your repository of accomplishments and things you are proud of and like to talk about. The more you have the better!
Step 2a) Refine your bullets
Now that you have a long list of (rough) notes of all the things you are proud of, you want to build them into juicy bullet points. A favorite structure of mine is “What did you do, how did you do it and what was the outcome”. By following this simple structure, you add valuable context and create “mini-stories” that are easy to remember and re-tell.
- “Exceed quota” -> “Exceed sales quote over 2 years. Developed analysis to identify underperformers in portfolio and created scalable methodology to pitch to them leading to x$ new business and % yoy growth.”
- “Passionate about football” -> “Member of school football team for 4 years. Demonstrated high level of discipline and work ethic to win roster spot every year, leading to 24 games and 1 title”
You get the idea. Very important to remember that these should go through many many rounds of edits and re-writes to further refine and you are happy. At the same time: I still do this after many years of practicing so don’t stress yourself with perfection too much.
Do that with all of your bullets and as a result you should have a list of very nice and juicy bullets of key achievements that you are proud of from all stages of your life.
Step 2b) Add depth to your bullets
Depending on who you talk to you should be able to dial up and down the level of depth when speaking about any of your bullets. Let’s assume eg you speak to a recruiter or even the CEO of a business about your sales skills. Most likely they will want high-level figures like “outperformed quota by x” and maybe a short sentence on how you did it.
However, if you speak to the actual sales manager on the team, she will probably be interested in going really deep into how you did your analysis or what methodology exactly you developed. To be ready to “dance” on any of these, start with high-level descriptions and then go deeper with every sentence.
- “Exceed quota” → “Exceed sales quote over 2 years. Developed analysis to identify underperformers in the portfolio and created scalable methodology to pitch to them leading to x$ new business and % yoy growth.” → “The analysis was based on a SQL script I wrote to query our database to identify which client that was categorized as startup, had not grown by over 20%. My hypothesis here ways x,y,z. The initial outcome was abc, we then refined it to drive impact of xyz.”
This way you will be ready to speak about your accomplishments at any level. From high level, context setting overviews all the way down to going into details. Doing this part is important because especially as you go deeper, you probably have different options on what to highlight, so if you take time to prepare it you can ensure that you tell the story the way you want it to be told, not how it comes up to your mind “in the moment” if you have to “freestyle” it.
Step 3) Prepare your case
Before each of these conversations, take at least a few minutes to think about what the other person is most likely looking for. With that in mind, you go to your repository of bullets and pick the 3–5 bullets that you think are the most relevant.
My standard intro to talk about myself is a mix of 2–3 work-related bullets, 1 about my education and 1 personal. It goes something like that:
“Im a tech professional currently doing xyz at Stripe. Previously I spent x years at Google doing a) and b). I hold a degree in business and when Im not working I love to spend time with my family (3 young kids) or training for my next marathon.”
However, if I was asked to talk about myself in a different context, let’s say when meeting other runners, it could go something like this:
“Im an amateur endurance athlete on a quest to run a sub3 marathon before I turn 40. While this is a big goal, I mostly care about the process to get there and I`ve found that running brings a lot of balance to my busy life as a tech professional at Stripe and father to 3 young kids.”
Once you have your repository, you can pick and choose the right bullets for the occasion.
Step 4) Go Beyond “Tell me about yourself”
The real chance of “Tell me about yourself” conversations is that they turn into much more. In a job interview, that often means the interviewer will want to go deeper into individual parts of your CV. The great thing is: Whatever area that person double clicks on, you are ready, You have your repository of bullets, waiting for you to be used.
“My work and travel in South America right after university? Yes, it was great. I spent 5 months travelling in South America learning Spanish and volunteering at a local NGO. It had been my dream to live in Buenos Aires, become fluent in Spanish and experience local football culture. After Uni I had the chance and literally booked a plane ticket to Buenos Aires, found a place to live with a local on Craig`s list enrolled in a Spanish school, and started working at a local volunteering organization. It was an amazing time where I learned a lot — first and foremost to speak Spanish. Even though it has become a bit rusty, I still consider myself fluent today, 15 years later”
If you do this exercise correctly, you should be able to do this for all of your bullets with ease!
Step 5) Refine & Expand
No matter how well your conversations go, it will give you a signal on what do to better. Do yourself a favor and always do a quick recap right after:
- Did my bullets do their job? Were they easy to understand and had the effect I desired?
- Where was my bullet too long/ too short/ too complicated/ not deep enough etc?
- Did I get asked a question I had not an answer prepared for? What was the question and what could be a good answer the next time I get asked.
Write all of it down and develop good talking points as per steps 1 and 2. That is how you expand your repository over a lifetime!
Bonus: Update your CV
And yes, you may have noticed yourself: With all these bullets at hand, writing a great CV basically becomes a copy & paste exercise. Here is how to do it:
Keep in mind that a CV is NOT a comprehensive list of everything that you have ever done in your life, but a highlight reel of you -ideally it’s tailored to what the other side is looking for.
How do you know what they are looking for? First and foremost the job specs, but of course also any other type of online research you can do about the company and role. The more you understand it, the better and easier to “match” your own accomplishments and skills in your CV.
Follow this simple structure forthe CV:
- Elevator pitch: 3 bullets highlighting your most important achievements (eg 2 work, 1 personal) the recruiter/hiring manager should take away about you.
- Professional experience: Start with the present. Your most relevant roles should have anything from 3–5 bullets. As you move down your timeline, and roles probably become less relevant, you should only use 1–2 bullets max.
- Education: As above, give more weight to your MBA or degree than your high school career — pretty logical if you ask me.
Your CV should be 2 pages max and you should expect nobody to read that second page if the first page is not an absolute banger ;-). In that spirit: every word counts, especially the top half of page 1. That’s what you should spend most time optimizing
If you want to know if your CV is good, give it to a stranger, let him/her read it and then tell you what they remember. If they don’t remember what you they should — back to step 1!
— —
If you find this framework helpful I appreciate if you do all those social media things: like it, share it and follow me on here and on X niko_schr at.