You know it’s coming.

It’s the most feared question during any job interview: Do you think I would look good in a cowboy hat?

Just kidding. The real question is: Can you tell me about yourself?

Blecch. What a boring, vague, open-ended question. Who likes answering that?

I know. I’m with you. But unfortunately, hiring managers and executive recruiters ask the question. Even if you’re not interviewing and you’re out networking in the community — you need to be ready to hear it and answer it. At all times.

Now, before I share a list of 10 memorable answers, consider the two essential elements behind the answers:

The medium is the message. The interviewer cares less about your answer to this question and more about the confidence, enthusiasm and passion with which you answer it.

The speed of the response is the response. The biggest mistake you could make is pausing, stalling or fumbling at the onset of your answer, thus demonstrating a lack of self-awareness and self-esteem.

Next time you’re faced with the dreaded, “Tell me about yourself…” question, try these:

1. “I can summarize who I am in three words.” Grabs their attention immediately. Demonstrates your ability to be concise, creative and compelling.
2. “The quotation I live my life by is…” Proves that personal development is an essential part of your growth plan. Also shows your ability to motivate yourself.
3. “My personal philosophy is…” Companies hire athletes – not shortstops. This line indicates your position as a thinker, not just an employee.
4. “People who know me best say that I’m…” This response offers insight into your own level of self-awareness.
5. “Well, I googled myself this morning, and here’s what I found…” Tech-savvy, fun, cool people would say this. Unexpected and memorable.
6. “My passion is…” People don’t care what you do – people care who you are. And what you’re passionate about is who you are. Plus, passion unearths enthusiasm.
7. “When I was seven years old, I always wanted to be…” An answer like this shows that you’ve been preparing for this job your whole life, not just the night before.
8. “If Hollywood made a move about my life, it would be called…” Engaging, interesting and entertaining.
9. “Can I show you, instead of tell you?” Then, pull something out of your pocket that represents who you are. Who could resist this answer? Who could forget this answer?
10. “The compliment people give me most frequently is…” Almost like a testimonial, this response also indicates self-awareness and openness to feedback.

Keep in mind that these examples are just the opener. The secret is thinking how you will follow up each answer with relevant, interesting and concise explanations that make the already bored interviewer look up from his stale coffee and think, “Wow! That’s the best answer I’ve heard all day!”

Ultimately it’s about answering quickly, it’s about speaking creatively and it’s about breaking people’s patterns.

I understand your fear with such answers. Responses like these are risky, unexpected and unorthodox. And that’s exactly why they work.

Otherwise you become (yet another) non-entity in the gray mass of blah, blah, blah.

You’re hireable because of your answers. When people ask you to tell them about yourself, make them glad they asked.

Let me ask you this: How much time did you dedicate this week to becoming more interesting? Let me suggest this: For the list called, “61 Stupid Things to Stop Doing Before It’s Too Late,” send an e-mail to me, and you win it for free!

from monster.com – By Carole Martin, Monster Contributing Writer

Relax — a cheat sheet is not really cheating. It’s a checklist to make sure you stay focused before, during and after the interview. Creating a cheat sheet will help you feel more prepared and confident. You shouldn’t memorize what’s on the sheet or check it off during the interview. You should use your cheat sheet to remind you of key facts. Here are some suggestions for what you should include on it.

Getting a job interview turned out to be less of a hurdle than Connie Corwin expected when she began her first job search in three decades.

Corwin, a member of OpsLadder, had not experienced an interview in more than 30 years. She had only known one employer, General Motors, where she had started after high school, working her way up to operations manager in the powertrain division at a manufacturing plant near Flint, Mich.

Corwin said she decided to leave in 2010 before outside forces made the decision for her. She had her resume professionally rewritten, recruiters were returning her phone calls, and she was getting job interviews. It was what happened once she entered the interview room that stymied her at every turn.

“I would be asked during an interview, ‘Tell me about yourself,’ and I wasn’t sure what to say, and I would give a really long answer that was very broad,” she recalled. “I gave the interviewer more information than they wanted or needed.”

She stumbled through the answers on several interviews before concluding that she needed to prepare every answer for every question she might possibly face. “I needed to have specifics, instead of talking in broad themes and vague descriptions.”

Corwin searched online for sample interview questions; she read books by human-resources experts; and she relied on her own experiences to develop a list of the 50 interview questions she was most likely to face on any given job interview, including “Why did you leave your last job?” “What did you like most about your job?”and “How would your boss describe you?” She then answered every question and practiced every response.

“I spent quite a bit of time trying to communicate what it was the interviewer wanted to know,” Corwin said. “When they asked, ‘Why did you leave your last job?’ I knew they wanted to hear my thought process in making this huge decision to leave my job in a tough economy. My response was to explain all the things about my previous position that said to me it was time to move on and what I hoped to tackle in my next job.”

Another question that she had stumbled on in early interviews was, “What were some of the important things you accomplished in your last job?” To answer that one, Corwin looked at her resume, pulled out key areas where she had led her team to success, and explained why those successes were important to the company.

“I did the bullet-point thing (verbally),” she said. “I did a two-sentence summary of whatever I was talking about, named some important skills, and then quickly summarized. You can only hold people’s attention for so long. I timed myself so I could answer a question in two minutes.”

Corwin credited her interview-prep method with preparing her for job interviews that eventually led to multiple job offers, including one for a plant-manager position at an aerospace components manufacturer in Seattle.

The 10-page document she created went with her on every interview. “The night before an interview, I would start at the beginning and read through every question. I didn’t memorize it, but I would read it like you would read a story.”

During an interview with a single company, Corwin said, she would be asked at least 60 percent of the questions on her list. “I couldn’t imagine a question they would come up with that I wouldn’t have a response for,” she said. “It’s a great list. Some people like to wing it, but I like to be prepared.”

Article taken from theladders.com

Don’t be afraid of this question; instead use it as an opportunity to position yourself for success.

When I was a human resources executive doing hiring interviews, I almost always began my interviews with candidates by requesting, “Tell me about yourself.” I did that for a number of reasons, the most important of which was to see how the candidates handled themselves in an unstructured situation.

I wanted to see how articulate they were, how confident they were and generally what type of impression they would make on the people with whom they came into contact on the job.

I also wanted to get a sense of what they thought was important.

Most candidates find this question to be a particularly difficult one to answer. That is a misplaced view. This question offers an opportunity to describe yourself positively and focus the interview on your strengths. Be prepared to deal with it. These days, it’s unavoidable. Like me, most interviewers start off their interviews with this question. A lot of interviewers open with it as an icebreaker or because they’re still getting organized, but they all use it to get a sense of whom you are.

The Wrong Response

There are many ways to respond to this question correctly and just one wrong way: by asking, “What do you want to know?” That tells me you have not prepared properly for the interview and are likely to be equally unprepared on the job. You need to develop a good answer to this question, practice it and be able to deliver it with poise and confidence.

The Right Response

To help you prepare, I spoke to a number of career coaches on how best to respond when faced with this question. Heed the career advice that follows to ace this opener:

The consensus of the coaches with whom I spoke:

• Focus on what most interests the interviewer
• Highlight your most important accomplishments

Focus on What Interests the Interviewer

According to Jane Cranston, a career coach from New York, “The biggest mistake people being interviewed make is thinking the interviewer really wants to know about them as a person.

They start saying things like, ‘Well, I was born in Hoboken, and when I was three we moved …’ Wrong. The interviewer wants to know that you can do the job, that you fit into the team, what you have accomplished in your prior positions and how can you help the organization.”

Nancy Fox, of Fox Coaching Associates, agrees. She notes that “many candidates, unprepared for the question, skewer themselves by rambling, recapping their life story, delving into ancient work history or personal matters.” She recommends starting with your most recent employment and explaining why you are well qualified for the position. According to Fox, the key to all successful interviewing is to match your qualifications to what the interviewer is looking for. “In other words, you want to be selling what the buyer is buying.”

Think of your response as a movie preview, says Melanie Szlucha, a coach with Red Inc. “The movie preview always relates to the movie you’re about to see. You never see a movie preview for an animated flick when you’re there to see a slasher movie. So the ‘tell me about yourself” answer needs to directly fit the concerns of your prospective employer.”

Previews are also short but show clips of the movie that people would want to see more of later. They provide enough information about the movie so that you could ask intelligent questions about what the movie is about. Hiring managers don’t want to look unprepared by reading your resume in front of you, so Szlucha advises that you “provide them some topics to ask you more questions about.”

Highlight Your Most Important Accomplishments

Greg Maka, managing director at 24/7 Marketing, advises job seekers to “tell a memorable story about your attributes.” For example, if you tell an interviewer that people describe you as tenacious, provide a brief story that shows how you have been tenacious in achieving your goals. “Stories are powerful and are what people remember most,” he said.

One great example is that of Fran Capo, a comedienne who bills herself as “the world’s fastest-talking female.” She offers the following advice: “Whenever I go on auditions or interviews, I have a “set” opening I use. … I tell the interviewer what I do in one sentence and then say, ‘And I also happen to be the Guinness Book of World Records’ fastest-talking female.’ Then I elaborate.” According to Capo, the main thing in anything you do is to be memorable, in a good way. Your goal when you answer the ‘tell me about yourself’ question is to find a way stand out from everyone else.

And, Be Brief

Maureen Anderson, host of “The Career Clinic” radio show, stresses the importance of keeping your answer short: “The employer wants to know a little bit about you to begin with — not your life story. Just offer up two or three things that are interesting — and useful. You should take about a minute to answer this question.”

To make sure it is succinct and covers what you want it to cover, she suggests that you “write your answer out before the interview, practice it, time it and rehearse it until it sounds natural. Then practice it some more. The goal is to tell the employer enough to pique their interest, not so much that they wonder if they’d ever be able to shut you up during a coffee break at the office.”

Rather than dread this question, a well-prepared candidate should welcome this inquiry. Properly answered, this question puts the candidate in the driver’s seat. It gives her an opportunity to sell herself. It allows her to set the tone and direction for the rest of the interview, setting her up to answer the questions she most wants to answer.

Article taken from theladders.com, written by Lee E. Miller.

Obviously, we all have specific words and phrases and ideas that match how we perceive Gen Y to think and behave in the workplace. Gen Y, made up of those born between 1980 and 2000, have their own notions of themselves, too. In Aaron Kesher’s, “Why Y? Plugging Into a Generational Powerhouse” session, Kesher encouraged all of us in the room to rethink our notions of what we think Gen Y is all about, to consider the strengths they bring to today’s dynamic workplace and to use this knowledge and understanding to more successfully recruit and retain Gen Y workers.

“Do not doubt that this generation will change the face of the American workplace as their parents did,” Kesher said. “In the next five to 10 years, the number of Gen Yers in the workforce will increase dramatically.”

As the number of Gen Y workers is only getting larger, it’s about time we as a collective workplace learn more about Gen Y so that we can understand them, appreciate their unique strengths, and more successfully integrate them with other generations in the workplace.

What is work from a Gen Y perspective?

• Work ethic: Job loyalty, for a long time, was shown by how long you stuck around and paid your dues — and older generations still think in line with this. Gen Y, on the other hand, says, “I show you love by how hard I work, not how long I stick around.”

• Tech savvy: It’s not so much that Gen Yers are tech savvy, Kesher pointed out — they’re tech dependent. They’re the generation that’s come of age with the explosion of technology, so it’s natural that they would be comfortable with it.

• Communication and teamwork: Gen Y is not necessarily entitled; they just feel comfortable asking for what they want. When it comes to communication, you can often count on Gen Yers to spread out the message fast and often. We need to realize, Kesher said, that throughout Gen Y’s public education, the majority of the work was done in groups, and that their role wasn’t usually as the leader of a group — instead, many were “equal” team members. Therefore, many Gen Y members function fairly well as a group and as “team players,” but some struggle in standing out as individual, assertive leaders.

• Money: Employers, listen up: Gen Y is talking to each other about the money they are (or aren’t) making at your organization. They are comparing how competitive your salary is with your competitors — and they’re not afraid to share their findings. One audience member mentioned recently hearing Gen Yers discussing openly the job offers and bonuses they were getting — and she was shocked.  After all, discussing how much money you make is one of the last great American taboos — yet Gen Y seems more comfortable with discussing this sort of information.

• Recognition: Gen Y is a generation of the “there are no losers — everyone’s a winner” mentality. “But they didn’t make that up (boomer parents),” Kesher pointed out, to a round of laughter. Gen Yers don’t care how it gets done –they just want to get it done. And they want to be told they did a good job once they do it; recognition is very important.

• Diversity: ”Why do only white people work here?” might be something a Gen Y worker thinks while viewing a company site or sitting in the lobby while waiting to be interviewed and noticing the lack of diverse employees. Gen Y doesn’t embrace diversity — they expect it — and if your company says you believe in diversity, but then a Gen Y worker shows up and all workers look the same — they will think you’re not living up to your diversity message. This generation has grown up with a greater awareness of and comfort with diversity of all kinds. From home lives, to school experiences, to messages absorbed from pop culture, they often don’t see what all the fuss is. This can manifest as difficulty in understanding why others struggle with issues around differences. A question of whether gay marriage should be legalized, for example, is a non-issue for many Gen Y individuals — and this shift ties into a larger cultural shift in general.

• Work versus life: ”I love my job, but I love my life more” — that’s something you may hear a lot of Gen Yers say. One of the critical issues that will need to be ironed out at work in the future, Kesher said, will revolve around workplace flexibility. We’re increasingly seeing workplace flexibility issues evolving in the workplace, and Gen Y workers in particular (though they’re not alone) want to know how they can maintain their relationship with work while still having the flexibility to live the life they envision. As mentioned above, Gen Y has no problem with work or with the idea of working hard — it’s just that their job will never be the whole of their identity. They were raised with the imperative to “follow your dreams!”, and their job and life may intersect in new ways than we’ve seen in past generations. “Gen Y,” Kesher stressed, “doesn’t want a job — they want a life that hopefully includes a job.”

• Being green: This is the generation that’s leading the green movement — so give them the power to build, make changes, and become leaders in your organization’s (existing or non-existing) green movement.

Why worry about Gen Y?
Ensuring that the different generations working together under one roof actually work well together is a big concern for many employers. After all, if knowledge isn’t able to be sufficiently shared from generation to generation, older generations will eventually retire — taking with them decades of experience. In addition, workers who work well together are likely to be happier, more productive and better brand ambassadors for companies.

Article from careerbuilder.com 

Whether it’s a high-profile tech company like Yahoo!, or a more established conglomerate like GE or Home Depot, large companies have a hard time keeping their best and brightest in house. Recently, GigaOM discussed the troubles at Yahoo! with a flat stock price, vested options for some of their best people, and the apparent free flow of VC dollars luring away some of their best people to do the start-up thing again.

Yet, Yahoo!, GE, Home Depot, and other large established companies have a tremendous advantage in retaining their top talent and don’t. I’ve seen the good and the bad things that large companies do in relation to talent management. Here’s my Top Ten list of what large companies do to lose their top talent :

1. Big Company Bureaucracy. This is probably the #1 reason we hear after the fact from disenchanted employees. However, it’s usually a reason that masks the real reason. No one likes rules that make no sense. But, when top talent is complaining along these lines, it’s usually a sign that they didn’t feel as if they had a say in these rules. They were simply told to follow along and get with the program. No voice in the process and really talented people say “check please.”

2. Failing to Find a Project for the Talent that Ignites Their Passion. Big companies have many moving parts — by definition. Therefore, they usually don’t have people going around to their best and brightest asking them if they’re enjoying their current projects or if they want to work on something new that they’re really interested in which would help the company. HR people are usually too busy keeping up with other things to get into this. The bosses are also usually tapped out on time and this becomes a “nice to have” rather than “must have” conversation. However, unless you see it as a “must have,” say adios to some of your best people. Top talent isn’t driven by money and power, but by the opportunity to be a part of something huge, that will change the world, and for which they are really passionate. Big companies usually never spend the time to figure this out with those people.

3. Poor Annual Performance Reviews. You would be amazed at how many companies do not do a very effective job at annual performance reviews. Or, if they have them, they are rushed through, with a form quickly filled out and sent off to HR, and back to real work. The impression this leaves with the employee is that my boss — and, therefore, the company — isn’t really interested in my long-term future here. If you’re talented enough, why stay? This one leads into #4….

4. No Discussion around Career Development. Here’s a secret for most bosses: most employees don’t know what they’ll be doing in 5 years. In our experience, about less than 5% of people could tell you if you asked. However, everyone wants to have a discussion with you about their future. Most bosses never engage with their employees about where they want to go in their careers — even the top talent. This represents a huge opportunity for you and your organization if you do bring it up. Our best clients have separate annual discussions with their employees — apart from their annual or bi-annual performance review meetings — to discuss succession planning or career development. If your best people know that you think there’s a path for them going forward, they’ll be more likely to hang around.

5. Shifting Whims/Strategic Priorities. I applaud companies trying to build an incubator or “brickhouse” around their talent, by giving them new exciting projects to work on. The challenge for most organizations is not setting up a strategic priority, like establishing an incubator, but sticking with it a year or two from now. Top talent hates to be “jerked around.” If you commit to a project that they will be heading up, you’ve got to give them enough opportunity to deliver what they’ve promised.

6. Lack of Accountability and/or telling them how to do their Jobs. Although you can’t “jerk around” top talent, it’s a mistake to treat top talent leading a project as “untouchable.” We’re not saying that you need to get into anyone’s business or telling them what to do. However, top talent demands accountability from others and doesn’t mind being held accountable for their projects. Therefore, have regular touch points with your best people as they work through their projects. They’ll appreciate your insights/observations/suggestions — as long as they don’t spillover into preaching.

7. Top Talent likes other Top Talent. What are the rest of the people around your top talent like? Many organizations keep some people on the payroll that rationally shouldn’t be there. You’ll get a litany of rationales explaining why when you ask. “It’s too hard to find a replacement for him/her….” “Now’s not the time….” However, doing exit interviews with the best people leaving big companies you often hear how they were turned off by some of their former “team mates.” If you want to keep your best people, make sure they’re surrounded by other great people.

8. The Missing Vision Thing. This might sound obvious, but is the future of your organization exciting? What strategy are you executing? What is the vision you want this talented person to fulfill? Did they have a say/input into this vision? If the answer is no, there’s work to do — and fast.

9. Lack of Open-Mindedness. The best people want to share their ideas and have them listened to. However, a lot of companies have a vision/strategy which they are trying to execute against — and, often find opposing voices to this strategy as an annoyance and a sign that someone’s not a “team player.” If all the best people are leaving and disagreeing with the strategy, you’re left with a bunch of “yes” people saying the same things to each other. You’ve got to be able to listen to others’ points of view — always incorporating the best parts of these new suggestions.

10. Who’s the Boss? If a few people have recently quit at your company who report to the same boss, it’s likely not a coincidence. We’ll often get asked to come in and “fix” someone who’s a great sales person, engineer, or is a founder, but who is driving everyone around them “nuts.” We can try, but unfortunately, executive coaching usually only works 33% of the time in these cases. You’re better off trying to find another spot for them in the organization — or, at the very least, not overseeing your high-potential talent that you want to keep.

It’s never a one-way street. Top talent has to assume some responsibility as much as the organization. However, with the scarcity of talent — which will only increase in the next 5 years — Smart Organizations are ones who get out in front of these ten things, rather than wait for their people to come to them, asking to implement this list.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2011/12/14/top-ten-reasons-why-large-companies-fail-to-keep-their-best-talent/2/