The 90-second "tell me about yourself"
Not your life story and not your CV read aloud. A three-beat answer that sets up the rest of the call.
It is the first question in almost every screening call, it is never scored on its own, and it sets the frame for everything after it. Candidates get it wrong in two directions: some recite the CV in chronological order until the recruiter interrupts, others answer in thirty seconds and leave the recruiter with nothing to follow.
Three beats, ninety seconds
- Now: who you are professionally, in one sentence. Title, domain, and scale. "I'm a backend engineer; the last four years have been payments infrastructure, most recently at a company processing about two million transactions a month."
- How you got here: the shape of the path, not every stop. Two sentences that explain why the moves make sense — a deliberate pivot, a deepening specialisation, a jump in scope.
- Why this conversation: what you are looking for and why this role matches it. One or two sentences, specific to them, not to jobs in general.
What to leave out
- Your university, unless you graduated in the last two years or it is directly relevant.
- Jobs older than about eight years, except as a single clause if they explain the path.
- Adjectives about yourself. "Passionate", "detail-oriented" and "hard-working" carry no information; every candidate says them.
- Personal life, unless you choose to explain a gap — and then briefly and on your own terms.
A worked example
"I'm a marketing manager, focused on performance and retention in e-commerce. I started in agency work, which taught me the media side fast, then moved in-house four years ago because I wanted to own the whole funnel rather than one channel. At my current company I run acquisition and lifecycle for the app — we took repeat purchase from nineteen to twenty-eight percent last year. I'm looking for a larger catalogue and a team to build, which is why this role caught my attention."
That is roughly eighty seconds spoken. It offers four separate threads a recruiter can pull — the agency-to-in-house move, the retention number, the team-building ambition, the interest in this specific role. A good answer does not close the topic; it hands over hooks.
How to practise
Write it out, then say it out loud five times and throw the paper away. What you want is the three beats in your head, not the sentences in your mouth. A memorised paragraph is audible from the first word, and it makes everything you say afterwards sound rehearsed too.