The Best Way to Communicate Your Strengths to Potential Employers
by Katy Hansell, ‘84
“Why should I hire you?” is inevitably on the mind of your potential employer as they conduct your interview.
How you answer that question is highly correlated with successfully progressing to the next stage.
What I so often see is that candidates respond with a well-rehearsed list of their skills and characteristics that they feel make them qualified for the position.
This response is the old model.
To understand the new model and why it is more effective, let’s start with a brief review what gets you hired.
What gets you hired is when the unmet need of the potential employer is solved by your top foundational skill. When the potential employer can see an alignment between what they need taken care of and what you are great at, you get hired.
The new model is how you make this alignment visible and concrete to the potential employer: you talk about your value proposition.
Your value proposition is how you deliver value from your work, i.e. what the benefit of your work is to your potential employer. When you present your value proposition, you directly map it onto your potential employer’s unmet need and build a bridge to solving their problem. The employer hears how you solve their problem directly and specifically and has cleared the first hurdle towards hiring you.
The shortcoming of listing your strengths is that there is no bridging directly to their unmet need. You are talking in a vacuum about what you are great at. In this old model, the potential employer has to do the bridging themselves and it is more probable that they will struggle with it.
In the new model, you are de-risking it by presenting your strengths, i.e. your value proposition, as a bridge to their unmet need. Problem solved. Candidate hired.
What I recommend to my clients is to present their talent stack after they present their value proposition.
Your talent stack is a cluster of related skills where you have a baseline competency. What creates value in your talent stack is how these skills are mutually reinforcing, so being competent in all of them can be more valuable to a potential employer than being outstanding in one of them.
I coach clients to develop clarity and precision in how they express their value proposition (their main foundational skill strength) and their talent stack (their main cluster of skills that are mutually reinforcing and that they are competent in).
The same communication principles apply when presenting your talent stack to potential employers that you use when presenting your value proposition. You map the talent stack directly onto the skills requested in the job posting: explain how your baseline familiarity will enable you to contribute on day one and how you aspire to grow and develop in this area over time to progress from mere competence to excellence.
A communication tool that can work well to do this explicit mapping and bridging is an ABC formula.
I do “A” (the skill I provide)…
to “B” (the beneficiary of my skill)
so that “C” happens (the benefit or value that is realized from my skill).
Example: “I provide platform analytics analysis to product managers so that they can assess the return on their marketing investment.”
Let’s pull this together and see how communicating your value proposition and your talent stack can make you more compelling and increase your odds of landing your dream job.
Old model: “I do a lot of spreadsheet modeling and financial analysis. I have strong quantitative skills. My boss says my work is high quality and gets done on time. I enjoy numbers and working with different internal teams.”
New model: “I excel at designing custom analytics to inform and evaluate business decisions by the product management and sales/ marketing teams. By creating a custom blend of internal and vendor reports, I was able to demonstrate the relative profitability of our online and in-store product launches, leading to a rebalancing of investment and a channel shift, making it the second most profitable product launch in our company’s history. My knowledge of platform analytics and financial modeling, when combined with my data strategy expertise, enabled me to integrate the right data sets to tell the story of how the market was responding to the launch.”
Now it’s your turn. Take some time and think about how you communicate your strengths. Once you have identified your foundational skills and related mutually reinforcing skills, try out this winning formula for communicating your value proposition and your talent stack to your potential future employer. Let us know how it goes in the comment section below. We look forward to hearing from you!!
