eGigHow to answer “What are your strengths?”
Employers want to know whether your strengths match the job and whether you can back them up, not just list adjectives.
How to answer
- Choose two or three strengths that the role clearly needs.
- Give a short example or result for each.
- Link the strength to how it will help in this job.
Sample answers
Use these as a starting point. Swap in your own experience and numbers, and practise saying your answer out loud.
My biggest strength is that I am organised. In my final year I balanced classes, a part-time tutoring job and the placement committee without missing a deadline, using a simple weekly plan. I am also a quick learner: I taught myself Excel formulas in a month to automate the committee’s tracking sheet. Both would help me settle quickly in this coordinator role.
I would say accuracy and problem-solving. As an accounts executive I have filed every tax return on time for three years with no penalties. When our vendor payments kept running late, I traced it to a manual approval step and set up a weekly payment run, which cleared the backlog in a month.
I am patient and I listen well. In my current call-centre job I handle many upset customers, and my satisfaction score is among the top three in a team of twenty. I let people explain fully, repeat back what I heard and then fix the issue, which usually calms things down quickly.
Mistakes to avoid
- Listing ten strengths with no examples.
- Strengths that have nothing to do with the job.
- Sounding arrogant: let the example do the boasting.
Practise for your job
Mock interviews with the questions employers ask for each job, a 2-minute timer and model answers.