What are your strengths?
If you are prepared well enough, this is one question that you can collect so many points.
I am Deniz Sasal.
I am a manager with PwC Consulting and the creator of The Career Mastery.
In this video, I will walk you through how to prepare your perfect answer if you stay
until the end.
Stay tuned.
Essentially, your starting point should be the job description.
Step 1: Take a look at the job description before going to the interview and find out
what skills and experiences they are looking for.
This should always be the first step.
Always start from what is required, then you can look for a match between what is required
and what you have.
Step 2: Take a look at the skills and experiences that may be required but not necessarily in
the job description.
I talk about this a lot in many of my videos.
There are so many unwritten requirements that only Hiring Managers know.
Most of the time, these unwritten requirements are not even in the job description.
This happens a lot of the time when HR prepares the job description without consulting with
the hiring manager.
Step 3: Then head over to excel and prepare a list of all those skills and experiences
you determined.
These should include both written and unwritten requirements.
At Step 4: Go over them and tick those that you think apply to you.
Step 5: Think of examples from your past.
Think deep and come up with at least 2 examples your past employment.
It could even be from your education.
Step 6: Craft your pitch and practice like crazy.
While crafting your pitch and giving examples from the past, there are a couple of important
things I need to mention; - Don’t give out generic strength statements.
These are usually; I am very enthusiastic, determined, patient, honest, respectful…
These strengths won’t get you very far.
- Also, don’t use statements like I am very good at sales.
Break it down.
I am very good at B2B sales, B2G sales, I have developed really valuable contacts from
government.
Or you can say I am very good creating sales funnels that have high conversion rate for
B2C sales.
See what I mean?
Be specific.
It will give you more authority and you will proof you know what the heck you are talking
about.
- The kind of strength statements we are looking for are a lot more specific.
For example, your expertise in IFRS, in project execution, strategy development using certain
tools, profitability analysis.
Go as deep as you can.
Just make sure it’s what they are looking for.
Let’s run an example together.
Let’s say the scenario is that you are applying for a management consulting role as a director.
So, this means we have to know what are the expectations from that role first?
In this case, they would be looking for someone who has the ability to manage multiple project
and teams at the same time.
Someone who has very good client relationships And has a large network of potential clients.
In addition, he has very good interpersonal skills and is a likeable person.
Finally, he has ambitions to become a partner one day.
Given these inputs, the perfect answer would be something like this;
One of my greatest strengths is my ability to manage multiple, multi-million dollar projects
while consistently exploring new opportunities.
I have been a management consultant for the past 15 years and so far I have lead projects
worth over 200million dollars.
However, I should mention that this was the outcome of a wonderful teamwork.
I was very fortunate to work with a wonderful team whom followed my leadership.
As a result, we grew significantly as a team and received multiple promotions in our career
with PwC.
I will put this statement in the description below.
Alright, that’s it for today.
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so you can see more videos like this.
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Alright, until next time.