I am right in the middle of interviewing right now (I'm open for any interdisciplinary business/dev/get things done role).
IMO when you interview you're always on the spot and always being judged. I've done it the other way. I am the type of person who likes to just drift away and associatively talk about things (hmm... the very astute reader could've inferred this given what I said in "1. Personal" :P). It has never done me any favors when I did this in a job interview.
The issue you run into is (quote from the article):
> "So, yeah, like, we're like working on this thing, but then my cofounder quit, and now we have this customer who's really loving the product but then we hit a bug with Docker because it uses React in the Kubernetes and now, you know, I'd like to know if you reimburse travel cost when I do the interview and stuff"
It's better to make the mistake of being too formal at an informal moment than the other way around. And honestly, I have been surprised to what extent I should not have been informal in the first place.
Moreover, people will somehow signal to what extent you're being too formal. I can tell from their body language. However, when I'm too informal I can't actually tell to what extent I'm too informal.
"Tell me about yourself" is simply not the kind of thing normal people ask each other for breaking the ice. It's a stressful question that puts people on the spot and forces them to 'create' a first impression.
Now, I do think that one should do a little bit of homework to give a somewhat structured answer to "Tell me about yourself", but there is such a thing as too perfect, at which point it becomes jarring.
And as another person argued correctly, I probably didn't fully succeed at that.
Just because an answer is structured, doesn't mean it's dishonest.
When I was structured I did use a variation the STAR method when they expected me to. Having a method like that makes things quicker to go through, as long as you make it your own and own it. I adapted the framework a bit by swapping the T (Task) for P (Problem) as it sense to me why you'd need to emphasize the task as opposed to the problem you'd be trying to solve. In rare cases I also adapted it to the SPARAR method, since the result made the problem smaller but didn't fully solve it yet.
I prefer to structure things on the fly though without a pre-defined framework.
> Me: Alright, there are three perspectives I'd quickly like to touch:
> 1. Personal
> 2. Educational
> 3. Professional
That seems so forced and unnatural that it makes me cringe. 'Tell me about yourself' should be a natural conversation starter, not an exam that you did your homework for.