I have participated in several hiring processes at my current company and others before that as well. I mostly focused on hiring senior software engineers on all of them. This post provides some guidance on how to answer the question: Could you tell me about yourself?

This is a very common first question. Usually, it is the first step to get to know more about you.

This question can be asked in many different ways, such as “Could you give us an overview of your career?” or “Could you explain your past experiences?”, but what interviewers are really asking is “Why do you think you are a fit for this job position?”

It’s your job to answer that by using your Elevator Pitch ™️.

ℹ Info
An elevator pitch quickly summarizes your experiences and skills in a short period of time, like the time it takes to go up in an elevator. It can either elevate the tone or level of the interview or diminish it.

A good elevator pitch will:

1. Connect your skills to the job position or company stack

If the job description is asking for a Ruby engineer and you have experience with Ruby, avoid talking too much about Java.

If you have more experiences in Java than in Ruby, try to highlight the skills that are interchangeable.

2. Only talk about your last couple of most impactful experiences

Avoid going through all your experiences. Bring to the front the ones where you had a great impact, such as leading the research, planning, and/or implementation of a large feature, refactor, or optimization.

Some folks make the mistake of going through all their experiences starting from their first few jobs usually as interns.

Others only talk about their current job, even if they didn’t have many opportunities to do impactful work.

Talk about the most impactful and relevant experiences, connecting them to the job position. They are usually the most recent few ones.

3. Talk about things that you can talk in depth

The elevator pitch is useful for bringing subjects to the table that we can discuss in pursuit of identifying if the candidate is a good fit.

Some folks overly use “big words” such as system design, architecture or performance optimization, but when asked about it, they can’t go deep.

If a senior engineer talks about doing great optimization in a project, but when asked more about it, they can only talk about making sure the app is hitting indexes or avoiding N+1 queries, that’s disappointing.

Example of an elevator pitch

Job example: Senior full stack meant to work with Ruby on Rails, Postgres, React and TypeScript on an app that serves 3M daily users. Requirements include writing code, leading projects and mentoring other less senior engineers.

H. I’m Lucas. I’ve been working with Ruby on Rails for the last 10 years, mostly working with React. A couple of years ago, I picked up TypeScript which has been a fun ride.

I’m a tech lead in my current job and my responsibilities include defining an implementation plan for features that we want to build setting the technical direction for our Ruby on Rails back-end, sometimes creating tasks, writing back-end code in Ruby and front-end in React &TypeScript, increasing observability of our services making sure our metrics are visible and actionable, having 1:1s with my peers and participating in the upstream process to help validating how feasible features are and estimate their effort.

I’m often drawn into complex problems which I love to solve. A cool project I worked recently was to optimize a task/script that would take several months to finish reducing it to be able to finish in 13 days.

I currently work on a Loyalty platform for ecommerce and another cool project I worked recently was a React app to be placed during checkout that would allow customers to use exchange their Points for discounts🍀. That proved to be quite successful being responsible for XX% of all Point exchanges.

That’s me in a nutshell.

Take-aways:

  • I only talked about my most recent role.
  • I mentioned an impactful back-end project and an impactful front-end project leaving room for follow-up questions.
  • I gave some metrics to show how impactful the projects were.
  • If asked, I could talk about either project for hours because I was deeply involved in them.
  • If asked, I could talk in depth about each of the responsibilities I mentioned. I didn’t include all my responsibilities, only the ones I could connect to the job position and that I had great experiences to share related to them.

Conclusion

A good Elevator Pitch ™️ is the perfect tool to give a great start for an interview. Write it down, practice it and try to use your natural language so it’s not so different from your other less prepared answers.

Good luck 🍀