SIZ Education | Best Answer to "What are your strengths?"
Winning a job interview can be a real headache because you have to be fully prepared to answer several questions. Some of them are typical common questions such as:
- What are your strengths?
- What is your Weakness?
- Tell me about yourself?
- Where do you see yourself in the next five years?
Can you tell me what your strengths are? (not that easy to answer this question)
Or why should we hire you?
If you were finding the best answer to this question, read the full article to find the perfect answer to help you stand out...
The psychology behind asking the question: what are your strengths? OR why should we hire you?
Many people would be surprised to learn that these two questions are the same. You give the same answer; why should we hire you when they ask you; what are your strengths?
This is a little unintuitive to most people. let's examine why that is…
If they ask you what are your strengths? What are you going to say?
Presumably, you're going to say many positive things about yourself that will hopefully persuade them to select you as a candidate.
If you think about the other question, “why should we hire you?”
How would you answer that? Well, you answer with the same thing you're going to be saying, “well, you should hire me because….”
And then you give a bunch of positive things about yourself that will presumably persuade them to select you as a candidate.
It's the same answer that you give, but these are literally two different questions. they're asking for two different things, and technically you're right
Here's the less intuitive part when they ask you...
Well, presumably, you're going to start rattling off many positive things about yourself that you consider strengths.
Does an interviewer consider your strengths as your weakness?
The danger is that you might consider these things strengths, but how do you know that the interviewer considers that a strength.
let me give you an example…
You're in a job interview, and the interviewer asked, “what are your strengths?” and you said, “the great thing about me is that i make very good decisions. I take the time to do my research to think things through. i don't buckle to pressure. i take the time necessary and when i do make a decision; it's the right decision. that's my strength.”
Probably that's a good thing for you, but let's pretend that you were interviewing for a job in a fast-paced environment, and you want people to seize opportunities. There's no time for thinking about things too much, and when they hear your answer, they would think,
“that's not a strength that's actually a weakness we don't want someone like that. we want someone that's going to move quickly and get things done and not take forever thinking through things.”
That's the danger you run; you think it's a strength, but they think it's a weakness.
How do you know when the interviewer considers your strength as your weakness?
So the question is, how can we know what the interviewer will consider the strength and what they want to hear?
Well, they've given it right to us. It's the job requirements. this is a great thing in the job posting. They've got a list of the requirements, and these are the things that they're looking for.
These are the things that they've said publicly “this is what we're looking for,” and you go down the job requirements, they say things like:
- We want five years’ experience in this
- We want this educational qualification
- We want familiarity with this software and so on...
Those are the things that they consider strengths. So let's look at how we answered the other question of why we should hire you?
The way to do that was to go down their list of requirements and explain how you satisfy each one.
Why we should hire you? OR What are your strengths? Is there any Difference?
So, for example, when do they ask you why we should hire you? you would say,
“well, you should hire me because well first of all i have five years experience in this; I do have this educational qualification and I am familiar with the software and so on.. That's why you should hire me.”
That's the same answer that you would give for “what are your strengths?”
Answer: “well, the great thing about me is that i have five years experience in this. i have this educational qualification and i am familiar with this software and that’s why i consider these factors to be my strengths.”
When they hear that, this is when they're shouting for joy and doing cartwheels and stuff because you're telling them exactly what they're looking for.
So that's why these two questions are really the same question and the answer to “what are your strengths?” is the same answer as or “why should we hire you?”
Over to You!
Let me know in the comment section did you find this content useful?
Take Care!
Image Credits: shutterstock.com
Let me do the honors to invite the Honorable Steemians!!!