Why should I hire you?
Today, I’m going to tell you how to answer, “Why should we hire you?”
But before I do, there’s two ways to answer this question. And it depends whether you’re fresh out of college or whether you’ve been working for 20 years. And most people confuse the two. They watch all kinds of different videos on YouTube and they get conflicting reasons, or answers about how they should answer the question and then they go in and they give an answer that doesn’t really satisfy the interviewer.
So, I am going to show you how to do it from both sides; whether you’re fresh out of college or whether you’ve been working for 20 years. So, if you want to know how to answer, “Why should I hire you?” go ahead and let me know now, by hitting the “Like” button on this video, subscribe to my channel and ring the bell and we’ll get started.
So, let’s say you are fresh out of college and you go and do an interview and they’re like, “Why should we hire you?” Now, for starters, they’re not just going to ask you, you know, your first question, “Why should we hire you?” or when they call you up on the phone, “So, why should we hire you?”
Everyone gets asked, Why should we hire you.
This question is probably going to come in, maybe even the second or third interview, because this is after they have already interviewed a whole bunch of candidates. You’ve already made it down to maybe the top five, maybe the top three, I don’t know. But that’s when they’re going to ask you to basically sell yourself. Because that’s what this question does. It’s asking you to sell yourself to them; why should we hire you?
Or you can use this in all kinds of different scenarios. It’s the same thing: why should I buy this car? Why should I buy this TV? Why should I buy this house? What’s the value in it for me?
So, that’s what the employer is saying to you. I mean, like, you know, “Why should we hire you? What’s the value in you? What are you going to bring to them that is going to help them grow and meet the needs of the company?” That’s really the root of the question.
And so many people, they screw this up because they’re like, “Why should I hire you?” “Well, because I’m a good worker and then I get things done.” And those are noble responses. But they’re not really selling you.
I mean, those are cliché responses that everybody uses. Everybody who’s not watching this video right now is going out there and they say, “Well, you should hire me because I’m a good worker, I’m a hard worker, I’m smart.” That doesn’t separate you or them from everybody else.
Get to the root of why they should offer you the job
You want to dig in to the root of the question. And the root of the question is, “What’s the value in bringing you on board?” That’s really what they’re saying. “Why are you more valuable than all of these other candidates? What’s different about you?” That’s what people don’t understand about this question.
So, if you’re fresh out of college, obviously you haven’t been working very much. So, what is your value? What’s so great about you, after coming out of college, and why they should hire you?
Well, that’s where you want to understand what is important to that company. What are they about? What are they trying to achieve? What are their goals? And what type of experience or college experience do you have that is going to prepare you for this role? What about your past education is going to make you different than everybody else applying for this role?
And you know what? Maybe there’s nothing different about it. Maybe there’s nothing different about it. And you think that anybody with a business major, I suppose, is qualified to do this job.
Be specific with why they should hire you
Well, you want to be more specific. You want to dive in and talk about what you’ve done in college that has prepared you for this role. And it’s okay to use workshop examples, lab examples, whatever. And then to take that one step farther; talk about what’s important to you. What are you trying to achieve in your career? What do you want to go where do you want to be?
And you want to tie that into your response. “So, why do you want to work here?” “Well, I want to work here because I really admire the type of company that you are” and being specific about why you admire them. “And I went to school for business, and this type of position is exactly in alignment with what I’m trying to achieve; where my career is going. And so, not only are you guys looking for a business analyst, I’ve studied business and I think I am a great entry-level candidate for this position because of the types of things that I’ve been doing in college and my career path and where I want to be going.”
And you want to be specific. You don’t want to generalize anything in your answer because they’re asking you, “Why do you want to work here? What’s your value? What’s so special about you?”
And that’s where people get goofed up because essentially, when they say, “What is your value?” And they’re like, “Well, I’m a good worker. I’m a hard worker. I’m disciplined”, and those are some nice values.
So, that’s why people use those types of responses in there. But they’re so general and they’re vague and they’re almost cliché anymore because everybody uses them.
So, if you go into a job interview and you tell them, “I’m a good hard worker”, you sound like everybody else. You sound like everybody else, and there’s nothing about your answer that’s going to make it easy for the employer to decide.
I mean, if you get down to the final five candidates and all five of them say, “Well, I’m a good, hard worker.” You’re making the interviewers or the employer’s job a lot harder to pick somebody when they all sound the same.
But when you can go into an interview and say, “I know how to get things done; on time, under budget. I know how to get things done with very little supervision. I’m very independent.”
Examples of why they should hire you
And then give them a couple of examples. Talk about, how you’re independent, how to get things done. And be specific and share with them. Tell them a story. I mean you can almost think of your answer as being an elevator pitch, “Why should I hire you?” You talk about, you know what you’re really good at doing; the value that you can deliver. I mean, that’s essentially what an elevator pitch is. It’s just a 20-second commercial about you.
And the cool thing about the elevator pitch is you can say this all kinds of different ways and you can have like a long elevator pitch or you can have a real short one. Generally, the elevator pitch is short. It’s about 20 seconds long. And you talk about the value of what you do.
And that’s essentially the type of response that you want to give, but you want to tie in the specifics of, “Why should we hire you?” into what the company is looking for.
So, knowing what they’re looking for by reading the job description, asking them questions in the interview, showing them that you understand what their needs are.
Because, I mean, after all, they’re going to ask you this question after you’ve had two or three interviews. So, this is your opportunity to recite back everything that you remember during the interview process and throw some things back at them. Say, “Hey, I know you’re looking to grow your customer base in this certain geographical area. I have a lot of experience in that area” or “I’ve studied a lot in growing customer bases. I really know how to communicate with people and I’m very good at this”, blah, blah, blah, and give them some specifics.
Show them that you understand where they want to go and tie that all back to them. And that’s how you answer, “Why do you want to work here?” if you’re fresh out of college?
Answering “Why should we hire you” when you have 20 years experience
So, let’s say you’ve been working for 15 or 20 years and they ask you, “So, why do you want to work here?” Now, again, this question is going to come later in the interview process after they’ve narrowed it down. And this is, again, your opportunity to sell yourself.
But remember, if you’ve been working for 15 or 20 years, you’re going to be competing against a bunch of other seasoned veterans in for that position. So, it’s not like you’re competing against a bunch of freshers who are right out of college. You’re competing against other people who are on the same level as you.
Now, again, when they get asked this question, even people who’ve been working for a while still like to resort to saying, “Well, because I’m a good worker. I’m a hard worker”, and you’re going to lose every time with that. Because at this more of a higher level in your career, they’re going to be people who are sharper than you and they’re going to give more crafted responses about why. They’re going to understand what their value is and the value that they can deliver.
And again, that’s the key to selling yourself; to selling them on you when they ask you this question.
Why should we hire you for sales jobs
So, when they ask you, “Why should we hire you?” I mean, if you’re in sales, what you want to do is talk about your long track record in sales and all the sales that you’ve made and talk about the bonuses that you’ve gotten, the awards that you’ve received and the new markets that you’ve been able to tap into, the new products that you’ve sold, product launches, whatever. You want to talk about, all the value that you delivered to your last employer and how you can deliver that for them.
Because I mean, that’s really how we judge people is based on past experience. If someone has a long, successful track record in sales, chances are that if I hire them into my company, they’re going to produce a long track record of sales. As an employer, that gets me excited because I’m paying extra money for somebody who has 20 years’ worth of sales experience and I’m buying all of that, bringing them into my company, hoping that they can do the same for my customers and grow my business.
So, that’s one way. Now, let’s just say you’re an accountant and then, you know, “Why should we hire you?” Well, again, that’s where you want to talk about all the experience you have in accounting and all the value that you have delivered.
And I don’t know all the specifics for what value might be important to a company about accounting. I just pulled that out of thin air. But I would guess that maybe as an accountant, you have given them audits. You provided a lot of audits to the company and you have kept all their books very accurate and straight to prevent them from getting audited by the IRS or something like that. You’ve helped them maintain Sarbanes-Oxley requirements. I don’t know; whatever it is.
But talk about the value that you delivered as an accountant, that you either helped them grow, maybe it saved them money, maybe you manage the accounts receivable in a way that you were able to prevent overruns and things like that.
Why should we hire you for engineering jobs
Or let’s just say you are an engineer and they’re like, “Why should we hire you? Well, you want to talk about all the value that you delivered as an engineer.
You don’t want to say that you’re just a hardworking engineer. You want to talk about the specifics. “Well, I worked on these certain projects and these are the types of things that I did. And I was able to complete them on time and under budget.” And that’s just another example.
Why should we hire you for customer service jobs
Or let’s just say you are a Customer Service Manager. Again, I’m pulling that out of thin air. So, if I’m hiring you and like, “Why should I hire you?” Well, you’re hiring me as a customer service manager. I’m going to talk about all the satisfied customers that I have created in my last job. I’m going to talk about how maybe we used to have a low customer satisfaction rating and how I improved that. I’m talking about the value that I delivered to my last company and then how I can deliver that same value for you if you hired me.
And you can apply this formula, this strategy to any type of profession; it doesn’t really matter. I mean, you could be a government worker and you could talk about the value that you delivered in your last role. It doesn’t have to be a production-type role where you generated money or customers or whatever. I mean, any type of rule that you’re in, you’re producing something or you’re helping other people, indirectly, who produce something.
And that’s where you want to talk about: what you’ve done, what your role was, which essentially shares with them what your value is to them.
That’s really the root of, “Why should we hire you?” I mean, it’s just a nicer way of saying it than saying, “What makes you so valuable?” But that’s really the root of it, if you think about it.
I mean, when you plan out your answer, just think about, “What value do I bring to a company?
And don’t say you don’t have any. Because whether you’re fresh out of college or in high school, 20-year veteran, you have value; we all do. You just may not know what it is or you may have so much value that you’re confused about what your value is. Well, that’s where I would encourage you to isolate that. And to isolate what your real value is, think about what your best at doing. What is your superpower? What can you do better than anybody else or as good as some of the best? And then that’s really the value that you bring to a company. That’s it. It’s not any more difficult than that.
Now, if you would like some sample answers to this question, they probably really won’t help you because your answer needs to be about you and what your value is. I mean, I can give you 50 different combinations of the same answer, but they’re really not going to do you any good because you have to search inside of you about what makes you so special. Why would someone want to bring you on board?
Why they would want to hire you is going to be different than why they’d want to hire me or somebody else. I mean, I can guarantee you that if you and I were to interview for the same job, our answers would be totally different about, “Why should we hire you?”
And that’s where you get the opportunity to sell yourself and to show your uniqueness about what’s special. What’s special about you.
And there is. There is something very special about you and what you can do for a company. All you’ve got to do is get it out because it’s trapped inside of you. It’s stuck.
And it is for most people. They have a hard time with it. It’s easy. As easy as I’ve hoped I’ve made this sound, it’s hard to get that out. But it’s really simple.
Download answers to: Why should we hire you.
So, I’ve got some sample answers for you in this guide here. It’s called Top 10 Interview Questions and it’s free. Because you’re here and you’re watching this today, I’m going to give you this for free. You can go to jobinterviewtools.com/top10. Just put in your email address. Tell me where to send it. I’ll get this guide right out to you.
It’s like a 30-page book, PDF, that you could download to your phone, whenever you want. And it’s going to give you some sample answers and some more structure on how to answer these questions: Tell me by yourself, why do you want to work here? What are your weaknesses? Where do you see yourself in five years? and 10 other questions that are like that.
Because they’re probably going to ask you 30 or 40 or 50 questions, but this guide is going to get you started and it’s going to get you into the mode of thinking about how to answer these questions. And it’s going to prepare you for those.
And more than anything, the cool thing about this guide is I talk about how to answer the question. I also talk about what not to say and then what you should say. So, I talk about both elements that should not and should be in your response. And you put all that together, you are going to be awesome on your next interview. I guarantee it. I guarantee it.
You sit down, you practice what I taught you in this video about, why should we hire you and the value you can bring. You practice these questions here; you are going to be a force to be reckoned with. You’re going to be in the top five contenders. Maybe you’ll even get that whittled down to the top two and hopefully ace the job.
I can’t guarantee you’re going to get the job; nobody can. But I can promise you that by practicing your answers to these questions, you are going to get so much closer. And through repetition and going on interview after interview and practicing and preparing, you’re going to be awesome. You are going to be totally awesome and you’re going to send me a comment and be like, “Don, that was awesome. I watched that video. I read that book, Boom. I got the job.” And that’s the way it works.
And if you’ve looked around on my channel, you’ve probably seen that other people are writing with similar comments. “Hey, I watch this video. I got a job.”
So, there you go, my friend. That is all I have for you.
So, if you like this video; you like what we’re doing here, go ahead and please share this video with a friend, subscribe to my channel. And I will see you in the next video. Take care. Bye now.
