CAREER

The best answer to the job interview

question 'Tell me about yourself'
'If you answer this poorly, you set yourself up to get grilled by the interviewer. You’ll be
a nervous, rambling wreck,' writes Kalibrr co-founder and CEO Paul Rivera

Paul Rivera

Published 9:52 PM, May 10, 2016

Updated 9:52 PM, May 10, 2016

TELL ME ABOUT YOURSELF. This seemingly simple question can make or break
an interview. Illustration by Ernest Fiestan/Rappler

An earlier version of this story first appeared on Kalibrr. Visit this page for more on the
ups and downs of navigating your career.

Talking about yourself should be easy, right? Who knows you better than you? However,
in an interview, we don’t want to know everything about you. We don’t care about your
life story – who your parents are, what they do, your religion, and where you live. Its
probably the most common mistake I see people making – spending too much time
talking about personal information, rather than painting a picture of their professional
background and career aspirations.
If you answer this poorly, you set yourself up to get grilled by the interviewer. You’ll be
a nervous, rambling wreck. We’ve seen it many times and its entirely avoidable if you’re
prepared.

If you are prepared and answer this question well, then you set the tone for the interview
and immediately begin the process of selling yourself to the interviewer.

And that’s what you're doing here – you want to start the interview by essentially saying
how awesome you are and why I’m the best candidate for this job.

The best way to answer this question is to make sure you cover this core theme in your
answer:

How does your personal and professional background relate to you being an extremely
good candidate for the position you’re interviewing for?

Any information that doesn’t make a strong case for you should be an excellent candidate
isn’t important here.

A good answer shouldn’t be more than 60-90 seconds and should cover core these core
points:

 Where’d you go to school (and what you studied)

 A very short summation of your career or background
 The last job you’ve had, what that company did, key responsibilities and one important impact
you made in that organization
 Why you’re there interviewing for this job

Here’s what I would say if I were interviewing for a call center agent:

Hi, my name is Paul Rivera. I graduated with a Political Economy degree from UC Berkeley and have
spent the last 10 years working for and starting internet startups. I’m currently the CEO at Kalibrr. Kalibrr
is talent matching platform based in the Philippines with global investors like Y Combinator and Omidyar
Network. My key responsibilities there include management of strategy, sales, customer success,
marketing, finance and legal. I spearheaded the raising of $2 million in venture capital funding for Kalibrr
in 2013, which was a record for a seed round for a Philippine startup. I’ve also directly managed product
before creating a product team overseen by our COO. Though I enjoy the work I do at Kalibrr, I see a
tremendous opportunity to leverage my skills and experience, especially with excellent communication
ability, to be an outstanding call center agent at Accenture and that’s why I’m here interviewing with
you right now.

The best thing about this interview question is you almost always will get it so practice it,
rehearse it, and memorize it so you start off your interview in control and with
momentum. Your answer and how well you tell your story will drive the rest of the
interview. In our opinion, the better you start, the better you finish.

What if you have no professional background and just graduated from school?

Not a problem – here are the core points you should cover:

 Where did you go to school

 What was your course and how is that going to be useful for you for this job
 Key coursework, an internship/OJT, or work experience and what they taught you
 Why this company + this job to start your career?

If Paul was graduating from Jose Rizal University with an HRM degree and was
interviewing for a Recruitment Assistant job at Globe, here’s what he would say:

Hi, my name is Paul Rivera and I’m a fresh graduate of Jose Rizal University. I studied Human Resources
Management because I really enjoy working with people and I’m fascinated with the role of people in
building and operating companies. Without the people, you don’t have a business. While in school, I was
an OJT during my fourth year at Jollibee Corp where I worked with their recruitment team and helped
coordinate the interview of candidates for cashier roles at Jollibee restaurants. I really understood the
role and value that recruiters create and how they help ensure a company always hires the best talent. I
saw an opportunity on Kalibrr to be a Recruitment Assistant at Globe and after doing my research, I saw
that Globe was one of the best companies in the Philippines and I feel my experience and work ethic will
make me a valuable contributor at Globe.

So there you have it – a template for you to answer the ‘Tell Me About Yourself’
question. Write this down on paper and practice it until you have it memorized and can
say it without looking like you’ve memorized it. Make sure you customize it for every
interview you do – so research the job and the company and really understand what they
do and how you could add value to them.

Put on your best Piolo Pascual and nail that interview.

If you want Kalibrr to help you, just leave a comment and we’ll make sure you have an
awesome answer to tell me about yourself.– Rappler.com

Paul Rivera is the co-founder and CEO of Kalibrr.

Looking for your next step or starting a new phase in your career? Check out this jobs
portal by Kalibrr x Rappler for options. You can follow Kalibrr on Facebook,Twitter,
or Instagram.

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TECHNOLOGY

Talking Kalibrr with CEO Paul Rivera

Kalibrr CEO Paul Rivera talks to Rappler about the BPO industry and how Kalibrr helps
people break into that field

Victor Barreiro Jr.

@vbarreirojr

Published 3:06 PM, June 29, 2013

Updated 3:06 PM, June 29, 2013

PAUL RIVERA SPEAKS. Kalibrr's CEO talks to Rappler about what his company
brings to the table.

MANILA, Philippines - Paul Rivera is an intriguing fellow with an even more intriguing
company under his wing. The company he's started, known as Kalibrr, is focused on
teaching people how to become a part of the Philippine BPO industry.

Kalibrr provides people not only with free skill assessments and training to become a
high-caliber worker in the BPO industry, but also connects companies looking for new
members with people looking for jobs.

In an interview, Rivera discussed the Kalibrr platform, what makes it different from your
standard training institution or hiring agency, and what he wants for Kalibrr and for
Filipinos seeking to move forward in life.

Kalibrr and the BPO industry

Rivera explained that Kalibrr is a company that helps people get jobs in the call center
industry by testing people to see if they've got the skills, and then training them to build
upon the skills they have, so they can qualify for a position in one of Kalibrr's partner
groups.
The reasoning behind this startup's focus on the BPO or call center industry is that it's a
growing Philippine industry that can provide a good career starting point.

As Rivera explained, "It’s the fastest growing industry in the Philippines. It will
contribute US$16 billion in GDP to this country this year. It will employ over one million
people working for some of the best companies in the world, including Accenture,
HSBC, and IBM, and it provides an amazing place for Filipinos to start their first job out
of college because it allows them to further build the skills that make them very
marketable through the rest of their career."

The process and limitations

The first step in getting a job through Kalibrr is signing up to be tested under Kalibrr's
platform. After creating a free account on their website, users take an assessment to test
their skill sets and capabilities.

Those whose scores qualify them for advancement using the Kalibrr platform are either
endorsed for interviews with partner companies or endorsed for additional training to
prepare the applicants for a future interview with partner companies.

While this allows for a more inclusive method of finding applicants to become a part of
Kalibrr's recruitment program, Rivera acknowledges that the program in its current state
can't take all willing applicants on if they don't have the base set of skills needed by the
industry — such as a working knowledge of the English language.

Training and persistence through failure

Rivera said that what Kalibrr provides on its platform is training people for the job they'll
undertake in the industry and adjustments for correctable skill deficiencies — such as
when applicants have trouble with pronounciation.

An applicant's training regimen is based on the results of his assessment. Rivera tells me
that the assessment is there to identify what someone knows and, more importantly, what
someone doesn't know.

"It is what you don’t know," he explained, "that we provide you lessons on so you focus
your learning on building the skills that you don’t know, so that you can pass the
interview and have a good chance of being very successful at that job."

Kalibrr, according to Rivera, is in contact daily with its partner companies to better
understand why people fail the interviews. This way, it can improve its system with new
applicants. Kalibrr's success rate is at 25-30%, around 5 to 6 times higher than the
industry average.

Despite the assistance of Kalibrr, people do fail, but this doesn't mean Kalibrr lets people
give up. Instead, the program is designed to keep pushing people to improve even after a
failed interview.

Rivera explained: "But even the ones we take into training and send off to a job
interview, when they fail that job interview what we tell them to do is to come right back
to our job station for further training and we’ll send them off to another interview again.
We typically send one candidate to 3 different companies for 3 different job
interviews....The idea is to give them opportunities to learn and sometimes the best way
to learn is through failure...Some of them will fail the interviews but it’s in those failures
that they understand the interview process. They understand the interview techniques and
they further understand the skills they need for that next interview. So it is a very
forgiving process. because what we want people to build in this interview process is the
confidence to understand that if I fail one interview, it’s not over."

The partnership explained

Part of the reason why the system pushes its candidates to keep going and to eventually
succeed is that, aside from incubation programs that have invested in Kalibrr, the
company earns revenue through each applicant who gets accepted by the partner
companies.

"As a business," Rivera explained, "we are a success-based business, meaning we will
only generate an income if that candidate gets hired by one of our partner companies and
it is that company that pays us a commission that we earn every time they hire a
candidate that we send them."

He added this is a win-win-win situation for everyone involved: "If we provide the right
training and we are successful in that training, the job candidate will get a job so they
win, the company will hire someone they really like so they win, and that company will
pay us a fee every time they hire someone, so we win as a business.... I think really that’s
the best way to do this, as it incentivizes Kalibrr to do a really really good job in training
people."

Moving forward and never giving up

With this in mind, Rivera wants to build Kalibrr and move it further forward, not only in
terms of its reach around the country, but also in the types of training programs the
company offers.

"We want to go nationwide. Right now we‘re heavily focused in Metro Manila. By the
end of the year we want to be in the emerging BPO hubs. Cebu, Davao, Bacolod are 3 of
the next really big hubs that have been emerging over the last couple of years. So we
want to have a presence there. Meaning, we want to help the people in those regions learn
the skills to be able to get BPO jobs in that region. The next 9 months, the entire year is
going to be focused on expanding Kalibrr throughout the entire country and then from
there, what we want to be able to do is expand our job offerings and our curriculum
offerings so that you can get more than just a call center job...," Rivera said.

River said his success was something he had to fight for. "I myself have failed 20
interviews in my lifetime. Sometimes some of the biggest interviews in my life, I didn’t
end up getting those jobs, but I never gave up. I kept going, and I learned from those
failures, and continued to go to those job interviews until I was finally successful enough
to get a job at Google, which was the last company I was working for before I moved to
the Philippines."

At the same time, he wants everyone to aspire to greater things, and reminds everyone
that if they want to succeed, giving up is the only way to lose the fight. "My advice to the
Filipinos here all over the country is to never give up, because it’s only when you give up
[that] you lose in life. Even if you fail one interview, even if you fail two interviews, even
if you fail 3 interviews, don’t give up. Keep trying, because if you give up, what are you
going to be doing otherwise? Are you just going to stay at home and not do anything, or
are you actually going to keep trying to change your life and change the opportunities
that you have for yourself?"

- Rappler.com

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