The 30 second answer
Use present, past, future in about ninety seconds. Present: your current role and the problems you own. Past: one or two earlier roles with one concrete, honest result each. Future: why this role is the logical next step. End by inviting a question rather than continuing. Strengths should be shown by those examples, not listed as adjectives.
Reported. "Introduce yourself", "past experience", and "strengths and career accomplishments" appear in Zalando's 2023 post and in candidate snippets.
Template: present, past, future.
- Present (20–30 seconds): title, team, what you own. "I'm a senior backend engineer working on X; I own Y."
- Past (30–40 seconds): one or two roles. For each: the problem, what you did, and one result with a number you can defend. Pick results that relate to the job ad, such as latency, reliability or scale.
- Future (15–20 seconds): why this role. Tie it to the team's work, not to leaving your current job.
Strengths. Name two at most, each backed by one of the examples above. "I'm good at performance work. For example, I traced a slow endpoint to repeated database calls and removed them." Use your own numbers, and only ones you would repeat in a technical round.
Honest gaps. If the role names something you have not done, such as a stream processor or learning-to-rank, say so in one sentence and name the closest thing you have done. Recruiters pass this to the hiring manager; overstating it costs more later.