 why should I hire you is a common interview question, which seems pretty straightforward to answer, yet has a few sneaky traps to watch out for. And of course, there are lots of variations on this interview question, including why should we hire you? Why do you want to work here? Why do you want to work for us? And why do you want to work at this company? They can all be answered in a pretty much the same way. Being asked, why should I hire you at interview is great because you've been given a chance to speak about all your best points. This is also part of the challenge of giving a great answer. Which points of all the ones you could talk about should you talk about? Just listing out your best strengths will not get you top marks. To help you put together a great answer to this interview question, I'm going to take you through, first, exactly what the interviewer is looking for in your answer. If you know exactly why the question is being asked, you'll be able to give a much better answer. And then secondly, I'll explain three steps to take to prepare a great answer. And thirdly, I'll give you some example answers at the end of the video. My name is Jess Coles, and as a candidate, I was hired through tough recruitment programs into the corporate and household names. And I've also sat as a hiring manager in over a thousand interviews hiring graduates to CEOs. And I've been the board director of a recruitment company with 140 million in sales. Our How to Get Hired program teaches you everything you need to win your next role against tough competition and still save you time and effort. And if you like this video, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. Let's start with understanding what the interviewer is really asking when they ask, why should I hire you? The interviewer wants to hear about your best points by asking this question. The best points you talk about must be relevant to the requirements of the job. Listing out all your best points is not enough. For instance, if you've done a great job managing a Facebook marketing campaign and got great results with it, you might want to talk about the success when answering why should I hire you? However, if the company doesn't use Facebook to advertise or the job you're applying to will not be dealing with Facebook marketing, then you have wasted an opportunity to impress the interviewer. By hiring, a company is looking to solve a set of problems it has. Before you answer this question, you need to have an understanding of at least some of those problems, preferably most of them. So your first step when answering why should I hire you is to go through the job specification or the job advert and pull out all the key requirements of the job. Also make the time to think about your experiences of the job and cover any requirements in your answer that have not been stated in the job ad. It is rare that a job advert will have all the job requirements in it. Take a look at five to 10 job adverts to make sure you're aware of all the general key requirements for the role that you are going for and then create a list of the ones specific to the job that you're applying to. The second step when answering why should I hire you is to identify the top say three job requirements. When answering this interview question you want to cover the most pressing problems the employer has or those that have the most impact on the business. These are likely to be the requirements that are most important and thus are likely to carry the biggest weight on deciding who to hire i.e. those people who can solve those big problems are more attractive to the employer. To choose those requirements with the greatest impact to the business go through your list while thinking of the impact on sales, costs, time taken, efficiency, customer relationships, risk, et cetera. Order your list in terms of the biggest impact or the most pressing at the top and then work down to the least impact or the least pressing. You should aim to answer this interview question in around 30 to 60 seconds and as with answering all interview questions aim to create a short structured story with good examples rather than having a long rambling answer. The interviewer can ask follow-up questions so don't worry about trying to get everything into your answer. Choose the top three requirements to talk about when answering this question. The third step when answering why should I hire you is to build your answer specifically for the job to meet and exceed the top three requirements. If you haven't got good examples for each of the top three then choose a point further down the list of requirements that you can answer really well. The rough structure of your answer should include firstly the problem or requirements, secondly your experience and thirdly an example of where you've done this before. State the problem or requirement from the job description or from the information given to you by the interviewer outline your experience of dealing with this problem or meeting the requirements and then provide an example of where you've delivered a solution against this problem or requirement. And if you can combine several requirements in the same story and provide examples, perfect. Using the structure makes it easy for the interviewer to understand and then follow your answer and you're highlighting that you understand the problems that they have. Providing an example provides proof that you can actually do what you say you can do. Try to avoid making statements during the interview without offering examples to back up your statements. By matching your strengths to their problems you propel yourself up the candidate pecking order and will certainly jump ahead of those just listing out their strengths without any reference to the requirements. Do not give general answers like, you should hire me because I'm a hard worker or you should hire me because I have five years experience managing a team or you should hire me because I have strong analytical skills. These answers are bland and will not give the interviewer much or any confidence about your abilities. Here are two examples to answer why should I hire you or why do you want to work here? A professional level candidate might answer something like this. I understand that you are looking to increase the number of qualified leads the team generates each week by at least five. I've worked in the sector for five years building up my contact list and I've generated an average of 11 leads per week and consistently beaten my sales targets for the last four years. I use a combination of content creation, research and social media to identify prospects. It usually takes around seven to eight touch points your email, phone, social media, et cetera with my prospects before I start speaking to and meeting prospects to understand their problems and qualify the opportunity. I expect it should take me around three months to exceed your required five leads per week based on my experience in the sector and track record. I believe I'll quickly become a strong asset to your team which is why you should hire me. A junior manager when asked why should we hire you might answer. From the job description and your explanations I understand your current customer service team is struggling with high staff turnover and you're looking to hire a new manager to get the team back on track. You could always pause to wait for a yes or nod or something like that from the interviewer. I've spent the last six years in customer service in two companies. I've managed teams of four staff and both times took over when the team was not performing. It took me about six months to get the team back on track through training, changing problematic staff members and improving a number of the customer service processes. I worked hard at making sure the team were happy and supported. I think happy staff make happy customers. The customer NPS score relating to customer services doubled in my time of managing the teams. Our sales enquiries tripled as well and I got some great appraisal grades. So in summary, to answer this interview question well you need to talk about the strengths you have which are relevant to the requirements of the job. Make sure that you provide a good example or enough detail in your answer to provide the interviewer confidence that you can do what you say you can do. And if you're struggling to get your next job take a look at our how to get hired program. Thanks very much for watching and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.