What Are Your Strengths Interview Answer (SAMPLE ANSWERS for this question) - YouTube

So, what are your strengths?

I’m an optimist and a positive thinker.

Hmm… that’s interesting.

Can you give me an example of that?

Yes, sure.

When do I start?

What’s up everyone?

This is Mirel from Outplacement Assistance and in today’s video I’ll show you how

to answer one of the most common interview questions

and that is “What are your strengths?”

This is a classic interview question that can come in various other forms

such as “Why should we hire you”, “Why are you a good fit for this role?”,

“How would your strengths bring value to this role?” and so on and so fourth

They’re so many versions of this question, but the trick is

the answer will always be the same, will always have the same structure

so that’s why it’s very important to prepare this question before the interview.

In this video we’ll be looking at why do interviewers ask this question in the first

place, What are some tips and tricks when answering

this question, I will give you a great formula for answering

it, And last but not least, how do you identify

the strengths for each role, how do you tailor your answer for each role?

So why do interviewers ask this question?

First of all, they want to see if your strengths are suitable for the role,

then they want to see if you can back-up those strengths

with some examples from real life experience and they want to see if you’re self-aware,

if you thought about this before.

It will be really odd for you to say “Oh, I never thought about my strengths before…”

because that will show that you are not self-aware, you are not confident,

and it will be really odd to say “I don’t know my strengths”.

So let’s go for Tips and Tricks.

The first tip is “You need to balance how much you sell yourself”.

You don’t want to undersell yourself because then you will look shy, not confident and

less competent for the interviewer.

But you don’t want to oversell yourself because you will look too arrogant, cocky

and…

Nobody liked prince Joffrey, right?

Except Cersei, I guess.

And… maybe Jaime?

The second tip is that you need to showcase your strengths by

telling stories from your past experience.

And a great way to tell a story is by using the STAR technique

And for those of you who are not aware of what STAR stands for,

It stands for Situation, so you’re telling what was the situation you faced,

What was the Task at hand, how did you act, so Action…

and the last one is Results.

So, what were the results of what you did?

And we’re going to give you some examples in the formula section of

how you can use the STAR technique.

The last tip is that you need to keep it to Three.

And that means that you need to stick to three strengths.

Not 2, not 4.

The idea behind that is that the brain assimilates much better groups of 3 ideas.

And that’s scientifically proven.

So don’t go for 2, because this is too low, you might undersell yourself.

And don’t go for 4 because you might go on the oversell bit, so 3 is the magic number.

So what’s a great formula for a good answer?

I like to use EHS!

That’s not a really cool sounding acronym, is it?

Hmm…

EHS stands for your Experience, your Hard skills and your Soft skills.

The first bit of the formula is your Experience, and that is basically your industry knowledge.

And while I know this is technically a hard skill, it’s very important to emphasise

your experience every time during the interview, at every

question, and this is a great opportunity to do that.

And a great formula to use to present your experience as a strength would be:

One of my main strenghts is that I have extensive experience in the (mention industry).

I was doing this type of role before while I was working as a (mention which roles).

The second part of the formula, the H, stands for Hard Skills and these are

those skills that you gain through your experience, education or trainings,

so you need to pick one of those hard skills that are relevant for the job and present

it here Some skills (and you have some examples on

the screen) could be programming skills, Excel, Software management

tools, and so on.

You need to pick one and a great formula to use again for emphasizing your strength would be:

During my time in (mention company), I have

developed my (mention hard skill), as I had to do (mention what you did)

During my time in Lloyds I have drastically improved my Excel skills

as I had to analyse large databases and create complex reports and dashboards.

The last part of the formula are the soft skills and these are your

personal traits, the ones that shape how you work.

And some of them could be that you are a great team worker, you’re a great communicator,

you’re very good at problem solving, and so on and so forth.

(you can see on the screen some examples) A great way to present your soft skills as

a strength is to use the STAR technique that I just mentioned to tell a story.

And you can say something like In my role as a (mention role) I had to (what

was the problem), so I have (what did you do).

The result was (what was the result).

In my last job, I had to solve a really complex problem around a huge backlog of work the

team had.

I have applied the A3 problem solving technique, identifying the root causes,

prioritising solutions and implementing them.

The result was a decrease of 60% of the backlog in the next 2 months

And that’s your EHS formula that you can use for answering “What are your strengths?”

And again, this is your experience, one Hard Skill and one Soft Skill.

If you want to find more useful formulas like this one,

be sure to visit OutplacementAssistance.com and download for a great price our complete interview guide

I really recommend this guide because it has over 100 interview questions,

from classic interview questions such as “What are your strengths?”, to character and

competency questions and even brainteaser questions such as “How many babies were

born in the UK last year?”.

So what do you need to do in order to find the right strengths for

each individual role that you apply for?

Well, it’s really easy, usually the strengths are in the job description itself so if you

can read the roles & responsibilities of the job, and then in the bottom bit you will have

what are the strengths what are the qualifications

that are needed for each role.

If you don’t have that in the job description, you can search other job descriptions

For similar roles and you can work around that.

So, let’s take this Head of optimisation role as an example, and we can read through

the job’s responsibilities first, and we already see from the get-go what is the company

searching for and what kind of things we can use when presenting our strengths.

We can see things such as knowledge of Credit Cards or being the driving force of change

and optimisation across the entire customer journey.

What’s even better, when we move to the bottom part of the job description,

We can read what are the qualifications and experience needed for this role.

So if we’d pick 3 strengths using the EHS formula, the first one should be around experience.

And that stands out in the first bullet point.

So, I would start with: “One of my main strengths is that I have

extensive Credit Card and Financial Services experience, doing Operations & Change projects

while I was working as a Lean Agile Programme Manager.”

After that, I will continue with the hard skill and we can see that the job requires

Project Management certification, or significant project experience.

So, my second Strength will be around that.

I would say something like: “I also have very strong Project Management skills,

which I developed during my last 4 roles.

I am also Prince2 certified and have implemented over 10 projects

by using this methodology.

And then for the Soft Skill, I would pick “ability to work under pressure”

because this is a really good skill to have.

So I would say something like “Last but not least, I believe that I am great at

working under pressure.

and I have a great track record of working under pressure.

For example, in my last project I had a very tight deadline, so I had to reprioritise all of the work,

mobilise all stakeholders and rethink the way the project was run.

This was a great success and I managed to deliver the project one week before the deadline.

You can see that in my last example I used the STAR technique to tell a really nice story.

To say what was the Situation, what was the Task, Action and Result.

That’s it everyone, thank you so much for watching this video.

If you found this useful, please Like, Subscribe and hit the bell button,

But also, comment in the comment session below if this helped you in your interview

process, what skills did you pic, or if you had any future ideas for our next videos.

And if you want to have more content like this and if you want a complete collection of the interview questions feel free to download for a really low cost our interview question guide with over 100 interview questions explained

So thank you so much again and see you in the next one!