Career Blog: Leverage your 5 Greatest Strengths to Get the Job

Normally in my blog posts, I try to offer the reader five steps, ideas or suggestions to help with the job search or career exploration.  In today’s post, I’m instead going to ask the reader to give five things.  Or, more precisely, I’m going to encourage the reader to come up with five examples using my five steps!  Like on Sesame Street, today’s post is brought to you by the number 5!

It’s important to know your strengths and be able to articulate them clearly.  Your strengths are what will get you hired and you will have many chances to present them: in an elevator speech, cover letter, resume or job interview.  So today, follow these five steps five times to create five solid examples of your strengths and how you can use them for the benefit of a prospective employer.

1. Start with something you’re really good at. Maybe it’s a personality trait like being extremely sympathetic to patients.  Or perhaps it’s a skill like making systems more efficient and saving money or time.  It might also be job specific.  Are you a computer programmer who can find the bug in any code?  If you’re drawing a blank, think about it this way: What would your boss or coworkers say about you?  Or even, what do you want them to remember and say about you?  What makes you better than your competition?

2. Think of a time when you used this strength, ideally at work, but perhaps in school, volunteer work or even your personal life.  Reconstruct the story with as many details as you can remember.  You don’t want the anecdote to be long and wordy, but details help you paint a picture of your example, making it more powerful.

3. Don’t forget to include the concrete positive result of your example. Did your above and beyond actions with the customers pull in extra business for the company, or help you retain 99% of your clients?  Did your process improvement save or make money, save time or otherwise deliver positive results for the organization?  Did your creative teaching style get students to excel at the test?

4. Practice telling your story in oral and written form as a way of demonstrating and proving your strength.  It could be used to answer an interview question or to write a paragraph of your cover letter to show that you’re a perfect candidate.  Think of using the general format of, “I’m awesome at X.  When I worked at my last company, I really used my strength of X to do Y.  Here’s the story of Y.”

5. Repeat these steps until you have five good examples ready to use when you need them, for interviews, cover letters or anytime you need to sell yourself.