Introduction
HireVue video interviews can sometimes throw a curveball question – but those are actually quite rare.
Most questions in a HireVue interview follow a pretty predictable pattern and the vast amount of questions apply to a wide variety of industries, roles and seniority levels. The same applies to similar platforms like Spark Hire or VidCruiter.
In this post, the team at Voomer – experts at HireVue prep – break down one of the most common HireVue interview questions: Tell me something about you that’s not on your CV.
The actual question being asked
Well they sure aren’t hoping you answer what your favorite color is. What they are getting at with this question is that you might have an interesting story to tell – but it just doesn’t fit into the narrative on your CV or you didn’t have a question on the HireVue interview where it made sense to tell that story.
That’s what’s being asked – tell us something interesting about you that makes you unique.
You should be very happy if this wide open question pops up on your HireVue, as it is a golden opportunity for you to stand out from all the other applicants.
How to answer
The best way to answer this question is to combine two things – a strong competency or great example from your career with your personal life.
You don’t have to give them too much information about your personal life, just enough for the interviewers to quickly understand how unique you are and easily recall your answer when discussing with the hiring team later.
With this answer, you could use the C-A-R answer method – but it isn’t required, only if you are leaning heavily on a results based example from your career.
Example answer
Lets take a look at a short example to illustrate the above section.
During the onboarding program at ACME Corp., I found out that they offered employees some interesting online classes. Programming caught my eye since I figured that it would help me the most at work.
I worked through the entire programming curriculum and got pretty proficient at it, with some people at work asking me for help with their programming bugs.
Though that is on my CV, the coolest thing I did with my programming knowledge was to automate the fish food dispenser for the aquarium I keep at home. That way, my fish will be fed on time even when I’m out of the house!
Above we see a simple, straightforward example that follows the C-A-R method and definitively gave made this applicant stand out against the crowd of other applicants.
Common mistakes
I’ve seen this time and time again – some applicants will simply say “nothing” when asked this question.
That is the worst possible answer.
It shows that you can’t think on your feet. Everyone has something unique about themselves. If you can’t quickly think of something unique, talk about one of your passions and how you integrate that into your life. Chances are it will be something unique – at least to the interviewer!
Conclusion
This question is a great opportunity to score easy points – so take it! Make sure you think of a strong example beforehand and practice on how to position it in a what that shines a light on how unique and interesting you are.
However, even with a great example memorized, many people stumble when doing their HireVue interviews. That’s why it makes a lot of sense to practice on a tool like Voomer. You’ll get asked questions that are extremely similar to your actual HireVue, broken down into company-specific categories. You’ll also get AI-powered feedback on answers so you can land that dream job!