Interview Question: Tell me about yourself? 18

[AeroNucDef]

Hi

I was having a chat with one of my friends whose been looking for a new job (Design Engineer), he's been for a few interviews but he told me that he becomes stuck when the interviewer asks the "tell me about yourself" question. I tried to give him an answer, but I got stuck as well. I've been thinking about this question for most of the day now, and it's driving me up the wall. Being an engineer I'm quite good at talking about science & technology, but when talking about myself I can't think of anything that sounds right.
Not kidding here but my friends answer was: I'm a man, I'm a engineer. Quite blunt but right to the point.

What would you consider a good answer?

Yours
Fish

 

[jmw]

First real job interview I have no idea how it happened I got the job. I have a feeling they made up a job for me.
11years later and in danger of "man and boy" syndrome, we met in a hotel somewhere and part way through my future boss said "This is the point at which you are supposed to ask if you got the job. You did."
I can't remember any of these interviews being especially interrogative. We just chatted. But that was back in the days when Personnel departments worried about payrolls, contributions and pension schemes i.e. before they'd aggrandised themselves into PR and horned in on interviews. And in those days it would as often as not be personality that made the difference because if you got to the interview is was presumed you already satisfied the background or qualifications requirements.

On the next occasion one of the group leveraged a management buy-out and took themselves off to do their own thing(briefly, they sold themselves on - to a mercenary could care less about thee workers b***ard for double the buyout price about 6 months later) and decided they wanted me to transfer out of the parent company and join them. So although we had the mid-point pub meeting to discuss things, it wasn't exactly intense interviewing, just fine tuning the deal.

So on reflection, I guess I'd best advise people not to listen to anything I have to say about interview techniques.

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[casseopeia]

jmw, be careful about using the terms 'man and boy syndrome' and 'hotel room' in the same sentence if you ever find yourself in the SF Bay area.

"Gorgeous hair is the best revenge." Ivana Trump

 

[jmw]

Thanks Cass, that connotation never occurred to me....

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[brandonbw]

I would say something along these lines when asked. I graduated high school in 1997.

As I was growing up I found I had some fascination with cars and saw the Acura NSX and knew I wanted to become an engineer. I was then at a dinner party for my Mom and her friend asked me if I thought it would be interesting to understand how a soda can opened? And I said yes, and he told me Mechanical Engineering would be something I should look into for college. I then went to college under a ME degree and didn't like thermo so the counselor asked me what else I would like to do. I said I loved buildings and she suggested switching to Civil Engineering. So in the end I graduated with a degree in Civil Engr trying to find my path through college and there is where I ended up. Something that I love.

Then I would mention that my older brother is a surgeon, my sister is a West Coast manager for a big name company and my other brother has his own business. I was always given a job offer no matter what place I interviewed at.

Just be honest about how you got to what you became. And try to throw some other good stuff in there, and why would any of that sound bad? I think anyone can do this that has an engineering degree. I have never met an engineer who didn't struggle at some point in their life. The problem is that so many graduated engineers don't understand how to put themselves out there in the real world. Just throw out your life on the table and see what happens.

hint: When it's time for me to hire, I will be able to easily choose from the good and bad.

B+W Engineering and Design
Los Angeles Civil and Structural Engineering

http://bwengr.com

 

[Piper30]

Very entertaining thread!

I may have the best of all though. I had a friend interviewing for an engineering position with some gatekeeper HR person with delusion of psychological grandor. He was asked:
"If you were a present; how would you wrap yourself?"

He said "this is a waste of my time" and walked out. I don't think that was the answer HR was looking for.

 

[csd72]

Yes HR types are on a different planet.

 

[KENAT]

Sadly no, they're on our planet, I wish they were on another planet, they sure as hell seem to come from one at times.;-)

Posting guidelines faq731-376

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

(probably not aimed specifically at you)
What is Engineering anyway: faq1088-1484​

 

[IRstuff]

Yahoo Money had something like "21 things that HR wish you knew" and explains that while quantitative and technical criteria are part of the story, clashes may arise if the applicant's personality doesn't mesh with the group they're joining. Hence, many questions relate to the so-called "touchy-feely" subjects, which is where you get to find that stuff out. Certainly, finding out that an applicant thinks that showering once a month is overkill is critical, non-technical information. We had one such person, brilliant ECL designer, but you were always trying to figure out where upwind was, since it was otherwise extremely distracting to by gagging while he was trying to tell you something useful.

Likewise, a glib response about your only fault is that you're a perfectionist will likely get you booted off any short list, as that's a sign that you are a) disingenuous, and b) that you don't pay attention to intangibles.

TTFN

FAQ731-376
Chinese prisoner wins Nobel Peace Prize

 

[SiliconeAurora]

Yeah, but on the flip side, if they really expect people to talk about their bad quantities at a job interview, they really are from a different planet. Job interviews are the purest form of lying known to human society.

 

[mauricestoker]

Is this anything like the "men are from mars, women are from venus, and HR is from uranus"?

 

[jmw]

Hence, many questions relate to the so-called "touchy-feely" subjects, which is where you get to find that stuff out.

Yes, maybe but that is why there is psychometric testing.
HR do not need to ask stupid questions, they can make the applicant fill out a set of forms that are nothing but dumb questions but which are very revealing in a measured and reproducible way. HR trying to be clever doesn't cut it.

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[KENAT]

Plus, how many HR departments really have a feel for the culture of the engineering department and how folks would fit in etc.

Posting guidelines faq731-376

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

(probably not aimed specifically at you)
What is Engineering anyway: faq1088-1484​

 

[lacajun]

I know some people that snuck by HR or snowed them or showered them.....

HR has no idea what an engineering department is like. One paired me with a very young woman from admin, who was clueless about it. But, that was their way of mentoring me. However, their alternative pairing would have put one of those that snuck by them as my mentor. Perhaps, they weren't so clueless after all. :-D

 

[JohnRBaker]

This was one of the things which impressed me during our 11 year stint with EDS (you know, the company Ross Perot started, then sold to GM, later spun-off and which was recently acquired by HP). For as large a company as EDS was (several billion in sales and many thousands of employees) they had no formal HR department. Granted, there were a few clerks assigned full time to HR activities back at HQ as well as a manager, but all of the big decisions were made by a committee of line managers and corporate executives who met a 2 or 3 times a year. The day-to-day stuff was left to lower level managers and their admins who were given a lot of latitude to run their organizations. As long a set of overall guidelines was followed, managers pretty much did their own HR thing. Granted, official paperwork and documentation was handled by that small cadre of 'clerks' back in Plano, but the actual application of the 'rules' were up to your manager. For example, there was NO formal scheme for keeping track of vacation or sick days. Managers were informed as to how many days off each employee was entitled to but it was up to the manager as to how to manage that or to even give additional days at his or her desecration (and the only paperwork generated stayed in the admins desk). This led to the inside joke that the only reason that you CAN'T take any vacation was that "either you didn't have any coming, or you worked for an A###ole" (although I never heard anyone complain that their manager actually denied them vacation days).

And we first noticed this when our company was acquired by EDS back in 1991 (we were a division of McDonnell Douglas at the time). Every employee was given a personal face-to-face interview by an EDS employee where you could ask questions, get details of how EDS did things and where you signed your normal new-employee paperwork (tax withholding forms, patent agreement, employment contract, etc.). The interesting thing was that NONE of the EDS people doing the interviewing were HR people. In fact, the person supervising the interview process for our location wasn't even an HR person (more on that later). These were normal EDS people, volunteers from across the business units, some mid-level managers, some technical professionals, even a few administrative assitants. All of them were doing this on a temporary basis and when the task was over, they went back to their normal jobs, whatever that was. At no time during my 'mustering in' did I meet an actual HR person.

And then a few years later, we acquired another albeit smaller company and I was asked if I would like to be on the interview team, which I agreed to. I was just one of the interviewers and I was assigned to transition people at the new companies main software development site in Alabama. Then a couple of years later I was asked to be a 'team leader' for an acquisition where again I was assigned to one the new companies development sites in Oregon.

And the last time I was involved in an employee transition, I was the overall team leader for the new companies entire West Coast operation: development, support and sales, having to take my 'team' to offices in Northern California, Oregon and Washington. And while during our 'training' for each of these activities we were interfacing with what I guess you would call HR professionals, when it came to actually doing the interviews and answering the questions most all of this was done by the teams of regular employees with only the really unusual cases having to be 'kicked-up' to HR in Plano (usually someone with visa problems or like this one guy in Seattle once who demanded that I get our corporate attorney on the phone before he'd sign any of the paperwork and then was shocked that I actually knew who our corporate attorney was, then doubly-shocked when the attorney knew ME).

Anyway, it was such a relief those 11 years with EDS after my previous 10+ years with McDonnell Douglas (until you've worked for a large aerospace company you do NOT know what it's like to have an all powerful, omnipresent HR organization intervening into every aspect of your professional life, and even your personal life at times as I was relocated 3 times while working for MDC).

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

http://www.plmworld.org/museum/

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[csd72]

A star to you John.

Most of my jobs were at small consultancies with no HR, now I work for a company with a HR department I still have not figured out what they add to the process.

 

[HornTootinEE]

"...omnipresent HR organization intervening into every aspect of your professional life..."

Sounds like an Investor Owned Utility Company

 

[lacajun]

HR's job is to protect the company not the employees. Laws aside the company pays their salaries and bonuses.

 

[controlsdude]

So what your really saying John is that you missed your calling in HR? I should have been a starving artist myself, but hey I want to eat.

 

[jmw]

Over at BNET they have posted some 20 strange interview questions:

http://moneywatch.bnet.com/spending...-and-the-right-answers/5561/?tag=fd-moreOnMW3

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[321GO]

It is not about WHAT you answer, it is about HOW you answer!

The HR potato is trying to determine your personality, so simply play along with this knowledge in mind. Make genuine eye contact, don't ramble pre-cooked stuff but instead be honest, come across naturally and display HUGE confidence in yourself (even if you feel like cr@p)

I know it's all BS but it's what they want

Stressing about WHAT to say is beyond the point, as i said they don't care WHAT you say.. Take it easy and have some fun (instead of stressing yourself out)