What do you say when interviewer asks "Tell me about yourself"

This script has always won hearts for me.

Interviewer: So, tell me about yourself.

Me:

Sure, happy to. I've been into building products for some time now. I like exploring real pain points of people who are doing repetitive jobs and try to build some quick dirty tech solution for them. Seeing smile on their face when they save time by using my software gives me kicks. I've been coding in kotlin, nodejs for some time now. I love hackathons, the thrill of building something unthinkable in 48 hours blows my mind.

I've been learning ux principles around building revenue generating products. I've lot to learn from you guys.

Why I think it has worked for me?

• starts with a happy word, duh 😁
• it's not boring, gives warmth feeling, any non technical person can understand, tells the other person you are empathetic, "empathy" sells in interview
• at the end, show them you are not all knowing egoistic person, you are still a student at heart, always learning and growing
• show them why the interviewer is a milestone in your life trajectory, it makes them feel special

That's it.

Have fun. 🙌

I asked "what do you want to know?". I think that's where I lost the job

It’s generally a conversation starter. I would like to believe a good interview would not make a go/nogo call from this answer. I could be wrong.

1. I think focusing on letting the story flow and not really trying hard on pushing certain pieces of information because you think they matter for the job role.
2. You should time it based on the receptiveness you see from the interviewer’s end. Don’t go very long if you realise you’ve already started losing them.
3. Ask subtle question in the mid somewhere. For eg - “I could share more details on this if you’d like - at this point?” If they actually pause and ask a question, I think it’s a good sign.

Ironically, whenever I have managed this well and used this question as a good starting point have been the interviews where I didn’t fuss / rehearse a lot about this question. Just kept a few pointers in my head and went with the flow.

I would ideally phrase a question back this way - "Usually that is a broad question but I want to get a sense of what you would like to know about me, so that I can frame my response accordingly"

This usually works. They give me direction as to what their expectation is and yeah, you can give only the necessary details from there.