How to Best Answer: “What can you contribute to the company?”

One of the hardest — if not the hardest — stages that a job seeker goes through during the overall hiring process is the interview. Face-to-face with the interviewer, you wouldn’t be able to seek immediate help from your friends or family. 

Probably one of the most dreaded yet important common questions during your interview is “why should we hire you?” The question is straight to the point, yet we all know it’s a struggle to craft the answer that will get you hired. 

In this article, we’ve compiled a list of tips and tricks to help you ace this interview question!

Why is this question being asked by recruiters?

Remember that an interview is a way for your recruiter to have an idea of who you are and what you will be in the company (should you get the role). Thus, recruiters ask this question to directly hear your perspective on what value you can bring to the table. 

Recruiters want to get the whole picture of who you are. They want to know your strengths and weaknesses, as well as how you can improve the latter to become the former. With this, it’s important to practice and rehearse your answers beforehand so you wouldn’t get too overwhelmed on the spot.

How can you answer this question?

There isn’t a specific way to answer this question, as your answers will highly depend on you and your previous experiences. However, there are certain things that you should include in your answers.

1) Highlight your skills and abilities.

The first key thing to include is the skill or quality which best represents yourself. Are you a versatile employee, where you’re able to adapt and quickly learn new aspects of the job which makes you an all-around team player? Or are you an extremely reliable person, where everyone could count on you to show up and bring your A-game to your job every day? 

In order to provide a full picture of who you are to your employer, it’s not enough to simply state this skill or quality without providing them with an example. Using the previous example of reliability, you could begin to explain to your recruiter previous work experiences that demonstrate this quality of yours. For example, you could tell them how you were able to meet all your deadlines at work. You were always punctual and collaborative in meetings where you would always take the initiative to share your ideas with the group! Create a story out of your experiences — don’t just state something without giving context.

2) Talk about your best accomplishments.

An interview is similar to a sales pitch. You want the company to hire you because of your value, and how you can explain your value to your recruiter lies in how you can effectively talk about who you are and what you’ve achieved.

If you don’t have professional experience, don’t worry! Everyone starts from a place with no experience. Aside from this, you could also use the skills you learned in school and in previous student organizations or volunteer experiences. What’s important is that you provide your answers with evidence.

Again, it would be best if you already had a list of skills and qualities in mind before you head towards your interview. Preparing for this question will make your life so much easier! However, you should also remember that you should not repeat whatever you said in your resumé as your recruiters already know that. 

3) Use the STAR or CAR Method.

You can also incorporate the STAR method into your answers as this is a behavioral question. The STAR method, which stands for Situation, Task, Activity, and Result, can help you give structure to your answers! This method can help you remember to talk about specific key details so you wouldn’t miss out on anything.

As mentioned earlier, you need to supplement what you’re saying with examples. In demonstrating these examples, you could begin with setting the situation for your story. Why were you doing this particular activity? What was the context behind it? 

Second, you should elaborate on the task or activity given to you. Explain what you were required to do. 

Third, you could begin by actually explaining how you executed the particular activity. If you were in charge of spearheading a certain project, you could elaborate on the steps you took to complete the task.

Lastly, explain the results of your actions. In order to get hired, you must demonstrate to your recruiter how you can achieve success. Similar to the previous example of being the manager of a certain project, you could begin to explain the impact of that project to stakeholders. Was the project received positively? Negatively? You could also use metrics so the recruiter can get to know about your experiences better!

All in all, these are some tips on how you could ace this interview question! Even though you should thoroughly prepare for the interview, it doesn’t mean you should write scripts for different questions.

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Kalibrr is a recruitment technology company that aims to transform how candidates find jobs and how companies hire talent. Placing the candidate experience at the center of everything it does, we continue to attract the best talent from all over, with more than 5.5 million professionals and counting. Kalibrr ultimately connects these talents to companies in search of their next generation of leaders.

The only end-to-end recruitment solutions provider in Southeast Asia, Kalibrr is headquartered in Makati, Philippines, with offices in San Francisco, California, and Jakarta, Indonesia. Established in 2012, it has served over 18,000 clients and is backed by some of the world’s most powerful start-up incubators and venture capitalists. These include Y Combinator, Omidyar Network, Patamar Capital, Wavemaker Partners, and Kickstart Ventures.

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