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How To Answer 'What Makes You A Good Fit For This Job?'

This article is more than 8 years old.

Dear Liz,

I adore your common-sense advice for working people and job-seekers, and now that I'm job-seeking myself, I could use some advice! I decided to leave my job, which is going nowhere. I've launched my first stealth job search. I've had two interviews so far and I'm getting a little more confident with each one.

There is one interview question that stumps me. How should I answer the question "What makes you a good fit for this job?" I got that question at both of my job interviews. I heard myself going into Full Grovel Mode and saying "Well, I'm a hard worker, and I learn fast..." and I could hear you in my head saying "Don't be a Sheepie Job Seeker, Charlene" but I didn't know how to stop!

What's a  better answer to "What makes you a good fit for this job?" than a litany of my own best qualities? Thanks in advance, Liz!

Yours,

Charlene


Dear Charlene

Congratulations on your new job search and your new muscles! The question "What makes you a good fit for this job?" is not a question about your best qualities. It's a question about how closely you've looked into your possible next job. You're going to use your answer to this question to let your hiring manager or an HR interviewer know how well you've scoped out the assignment.

Here's a script to illustrate.

Interviewer: What makes you a good fit for this job?

You: Great question! I'll share my thinking on that with you and get your impressions, too. You've advertised for a National Accounts Coordinator to support your national accounts sales team. Researching your website and LinkedIn I spotted nine national accounts and they are all huge companies, like GM and Citibank. There must be dozens of contacts in each of those large clients, people who might have questions about their shipments or any number of other things.

The National Accounts salespeople must be swamped trying to keep their customers happy and well-informed about your company's products and your latest offers. As I understand it so far, the job of the National Accounts Coordinator is to back up your three National Accounts sales executives so they can do their jobs.

In this job I'll be keeping as much of customer care burden off the salespeople's plates as possible. The more customer questions and issues I can take off their shoulders, the more they can focus on selling. I specialize in keeping clients happy and up to date. I do that now, at Angry Chocolates. That's the best part of my job. I keep a million details organized and double-check to make sure every client has exactly what they need.

Once I can get your clients to trust me enough to stop contacting their National Accounts sales team with their issues and contact me instead, your salespeople's lives will get a lot easier. They won't have as many interruptions in their day. I'll be in their corner protecting their time by handling most of the day-to-day customer care issues on my own. How does that square with your thinking?

(end of script)

You might think that this scripted answer is too long. You will become more comfortable shifting your job interviews from the traditional, oral-exam-type Q &A format into a conversational format as you do more interviewing. Conversational interviews are the way to go -- they're more fun, less stressful and more information-packed, the way a job interview should be!

Notice a few things about the answer that I shared in the script. It doesn't talk about you until the very end. It talks about the assignment, instead! You are showing the interviewer that you are plugged in and paying attention -- because sadly, most job-seekers are not. They would hear the question "What makes you a good fit for this job?" and plunge right into a list of their best attributes. That will not distinguish them or leave any particular impression on the interviewer.

Your job in a job interviewer is to show your brain working and to get the interviewer's brain working, too.

You'll start your answer by sharing what you know about the job opening and in particular, your hypothesis about the type of Business Pain that the company is hiring someone to relieve. Keep that in mind, because if there were no Business Pain, they wouldn't be hiring anyone.

Talk about the pain first. Then talk about how nice it will be when that pain goes away -- talk about the desired state of things. Lastly, talk about your experience solving the same kind of Business Pain in a past job or some other life experience. Does this sound a lot like the Pain Letter formula? It should! Pain Letters and pain-aware job interviews have a lot in common. One thing they have in common is that they both tend to get people hired!

One more thing -- notice that the answer in the script above includes a turn-around at the end. You'll describe what you understand about the role and the Business Pain lurking behind the job ad, talk about the nirvana state and your own experience solving the same type of pain. Then you'll turn the question around and ask the interviewer for his or her thoughts. That's how you get an interviewer off the script and into a conversation!

All the best to you Charlene,

Liz

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