Tell me about yourself: how to walk through your background in two minutes

• Your ability to synthesise. Summing up several years in two minutes with nothing wasted is the same exercise as summing up a project for a busy executive.
• The logic of your choices. A background does not need to be linear, but you must be able to explain why you moved from one step to the next, including when you changed your mind.
• What you choose to highlight. The two or three experiences you develop become the starting point for the next questions, and the interviewer notes what you consider important.
• Your ease. It is a question with no trap, asked at the very start, and it sets the tone for the rest.

1. 1

   Find your thread

   Look for what links your steps: a taste for quantitative problems, an interest in one sector, wanting to understand how a company makes its decisions. The thread does not need to be spectacular, it needs to be true and visible in each step.
2. 2

   Keep three steps

   Your education, then your two most telling experiences. For each, one sentence on what you did, one on what you took from it, one on what led you to the next. The rest of the CV can stay on paper.
3. 3

   Start from today or from the beginning, but choose

   Both orders work. Chronological order is the easiest to follow out loud. Just avoid jumping back and forth, which loses the listener.
4. 4

   End on why you are here

   The last sentence explains why this path brings you to consulting, and to this firm. Then stop: a silence after a clean conclusion is better than one sentence too many.

"I am finishing my master's at a business school, and if I had to sum up my path in one idea, it is that I have always looked for the places where decisions get made from imperfect numbers. I started with two years of intensive maths and physics, where I loved the rigour but missed the real-world application, and that is what pointed me towards business school rather than engineering.

My first internship, in the finance department of an industrial group, taught me to build a clean analysis. But I could see the decisions being made two floors up, and I wanted to get closer to them. That is what I found in my second internship, on an in-house strategy team..."

This example is made up: it shows the tone and the construction, not a script to memorise. Your answer has to come from your own experience or from the data the interviewer gives you.

• Going through the CV line by line, dates included. The interviewer switches off after thirty seconds and you have told them nothing new.
• Running past three minutes. Practise with a timer, because nearly everyone underestimates how long they talk.
• Listing steps without ever saying why. Without the reasons, the path looks like a series of opportunities taken at random.
• Apologising for a detour or an unusual background. Presented with what it taught you, a detour becomes an asset.