Answering the "tell me about yourself question"

I'm always irked by this question cos of 2 reasons some interviewers treat this question as a short ice breaker question. However, some interviewers treat this question as the same question as "Why IB"; the problem is that my answer to why IB is about a minute long.

Why this is an issue is because if I gave my 1-minute-long "why IB" answer to the interviewer who is intending the "tell me abt urself" to just be an ice breaker, my answer would be a little strange or even worse, he would cut me short and probably make me repeat my answer when he intended to ask me "why IB" later on.

Now, if I treated the question as an ice breaker when the interviewer intended it as a "why IB" question, then my answer will be horribly weak and worst case, he probably will dismiss me from the start and will not visit the "why IB " question explicitly again because in his eyes I already used my opportunity to answer it. I say this because I have had this happen before.

What the hell do you do in this situation? I don't really wanna explicitly ask the interviewer, " Are you asking about my IB motivations?", cos then I just look rehearsed, which is standard, but I'd rather not bring that fact to light.

 

4 Comments
 

Definitely not.

But one feedback I get from interviews is that my answer dont have enough depth in them and my motivations weren't compelling, so I'd rather risk telling a descriptive novel answer than save time.

 

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