Tips to analyze your strengths for personal interview.
Almost every interview that a candidate attends comes to a point where he has to answer a question, What are your strengths? Mentioning strengths for which you don’t have examples will be useless. Go through these tips to ensure that you speak out the relevant strengths and have examples ready to support them.
- List down your 5 major achievements.
- Make a list of your achievements which you are proud of. It will be good to list down some achievements from recent past but listing down some things from long past also won’t hurt.
- List down the personal qualities, skills, knowledge and attitude that were required to achieve it. Do it for each achievement.
- Make a list of qualities appearing again and again in the list.
- Select the top qualities. These are your strengths.
- Match them vis a vis the qualities required for the role under discussion and put the relevant ones across.
- Have examples ready for each strength.
Let us try to understand this with the help of an example.
| 5 Major achievements | Competency require |
| Awarded best member of the team. | Helpful, easily approachable, reliable, co-operative, team player, knowledge, good communication. |
| Promoted to Managerial level in 1 year. | Managerial skills, knowledge, communication, result oriented, approachable, team player, hard working, intelligent. |
| Won the intra-house presentation competition. | Communication, presentation skills, confidence, Subject knowledge. |
| Resolved an important issue with the client. | Problem solving, communication, confidence, subject knowledge, analysis, helpful, approachable, intelligent. |
| University topper during MBA. | Subject Knowledge, hard working, intelligent, confident, written communication. |
So, the strengths that emerge out of this table are:
1. Team player
2. Good Communicator
3. Good Subject knowledge
4. Confident
5. Approachable
6. Helpful
7. Intelligent
Now, match these strengths with the job role you are being interviewed for and put the relevant ones across. Don’t forget to back it up with an example.
