Why Should We Hire You? - 10 Great Answers to Give

Getting asked “Why should we hire you” can be an awkward question. It’s one of the most common interview questions hiring managers ask in an interview. But it creates the impression that the company is better than you and you need to prove yourself to them. Instead of turning it into a desperate battle to prove that you’re worthy of being hired, think of the question as an opportunity to better present yourself as a candidate and draw connections between yourself and the company or hiring manager to help you secure the next interview, or better yet, the job.

Why Should We Hire You - 10 Great Answers to Give

1. I have a growth mindset

One of the answers you can give to “Why should we hire you?” is that you have a growth mindset. Ultimately, a hiring manager wants to hire someone who is open to feedback, willing to get better, challenging themselves to learn, and able to overcome obstacles from being bad at something. Are you motivated by the challenge of something or defeated by it? This mindset is all about helping you unlock your potential. And a hiring manager who sees your results, hobbies, and habits in action will immediately know if you have a growth or a fixed mindset. So, if you have a growth mindset, you’ll want to lean into that.

“You should hire me for my growth mindset. I’m currently learning how to fight for self defense and it’s been a challenging experience. I’m not really an athletic person, so every time I go to class I get tested and it’s exhilarating. I’m comfortable being a beginner in things because solving problems is a fun challenge. In my role as an engineer, I’m constantly faced with an evolving challenge, such as integrating AI into my work, coming up with novel solutions to problems, and trying to catch bugs before things get shipped. My growth mindset makes me open to feedback, new tools and technology, and developing new skills.

2. I’m a really hard worker and my results prove it

When answering “Why should we hire you?” saying I’m a really hard worker is an often given answer. So, if you’re going to use this because it really is true to who you are, then you need to have results that warrant it. You need to showcase how much work you’ve shipped, big win results you yielded, or some other metric to prove that you work extraordinarily hard. You need to have created or produced a lot of something in order to get big results in most cases. The more you ship, the better your quality improves, and the more experience you gain.

“You should hire me because of my work ethic. I’m a really hard worker. And I’m not kidding. Last quarter I created over 1,500 videos for social media generating nearly a billion in views. I’m completely obsessed with content creation, so I’m always coming up with weird ideas and publishing as much content as I can to get some steam on the algorithm. Over time, I continue to get better at my craft because of all the weird ideas I’ve experimented with and because I’m relentless in the quantity that I produce.”

3. I’m a fast learner

I’m a fast learner is a possible response you can give to “Why should we hire you?” in the event that you really do learn fast and that learning fast is important for the role you’re applying for. In the case that the job posting listed that they’re looking for someone who can roll up their sleeves, learn fast, and get stuff done, then you could use the example of being a fast learner. If you find learning new tools easy, great. If you constantly challenge yourself to learn new things all the time, even better.

“You should hire me because I’m an extremely fast learner. I challenge myself to learn new things every week. I do something called Learn Saturday, where every Saturday I set out to learn something new and dabble with it a bit. Last Saturday, I decided to learn chess for the first time. And spent the afternoon playing games, it took about 20 games to get the hang of it. But I just dedicated some time to learn it quickly. The week before, I set out to build a robot for the first time. I spent 9 hours trying to debug the robot and at times it felt really challenging because I couldn’t figure it out. However, by the end of the day, I had built my first dancing robot and I was so excited by it.”

4. Because my skills perfectly align for your business’ problems

In an interview, a hiring manager will often tell you the reason why they’re hiring for the role. Maybe the team is quickly growing to hit high targets. Maybe they need to fill a gap of some sort to help them solve a problem. For example, if a role is new for a company, it could indicate that there’s a gap that isn’t being met.

“You should hire me because you’ve told me that you’re currently hiring someone to help reduce the company’s churn, which has been an unsolved problem for a long time. In my last role, I was able to successfully reduce churn, saving the company tens of millions in dollars in lost revenue, by recommending four new features that were causing the company to bleed money. These new features also help generate new revenue for the business. By doing a deep dive investigation into customer support emails, analyzing gaps between our products and competing products, and other measures, I was able to get to the root cause of the problem. By hiring me, you’ll be choosing a candidate who already knows where to look to find the true cause of the problem, so we can actively turn that churn problem around for good.”

5. I’m genuinely excited to work with you

Interviews are all about relationships. Do you get along extremely well with a hiring manager? Does the company seem like a place that’s fun to work at? Or does this job seem really fun to you? If so, you can use your genuine excitement about working in the role to help explain why you’re worth hiring. Companies do hire for personality traits and soft skills. If you seem to genuinely have alignment between your passions and this role, feel free to share it.

“Honestly, I wasn’t actively looking for a new job when looking around. But when I saw your job posting, I genuinely got so excited I decided to apply. Throughout this interview, you’ve continued to amaze me with all the cool things your company is working on, and I’m excited to share some of my best work with you. I’m seeing so many opportunities to be creative in solving problems at your company. For example,...”

6. I’m passionate about this industry

If you’ve been working in a specific industry for years, like about a decade, you can share how passionate you are about an industry. You need to have some sort of proof or paper trail to prove that your industry passion is true and not just something you say to get a job. If you don’t have work experience in the industry, but have a hobby in it, you’ll want to show proof of your hobby, such as videos, products, or something to showcase that you really do have genuine passion for the industry.

“I know you probably get this a lot, but I’m obsessed with video games. I absolutely love your gaming engine. So much so, that I’ve even started building my own video game. I’ve just finished this course about building your first game using your platform, and I’ve actually already gotten some Wishlists on Steam. I think I have about 30 right now, and my game is nowhere near complete. I’ve been practicing my game marketing skills for the past couple of months. I think it’d be so much fun to work at a gaming company in a marketing role. I’ve been working in marketing roles for over 10 years, but this industry would be a game-changer for me and I know I’d be genuinely happy to be here.”

7. I have years of specialized experience in this type of environment

There are multiple types of work environments that are unique, have their own quirks, and require a unique set of skills. For example, those who work at agencies often have to produce a lot of creative work quickly. There’s also a need to be able to promote your agency to continue getting new clients. Alternatively, a startup environment also requires a high work ethic, you need to be able to be scrappy, build things independently, and work well on small teams where each person wears multiple hats. In a completely different world, there’s the corporate environment, where there’s more bureaucracy. In this environment being able to get resourcing is hard, you also need to know how to navigate office politics.

“I’ve been a startup marketer for years. In the years where I wasn’t working in a startup it’s because the one I was working at had been acquired and I had to join the corporate environment. To be honest, the corporate environment is a bit too slow for me. I’ve had too many people tell me that it’s obvious I don’t have an off button. From a work perspective, I’m able to outproduce most of my colleagues because of this. In a startup environment, I’m able to produce the results of an entire marketing team because I’m able to get stuff done quickly. I’ve been told I’m very prolific. You should hire me because not only will I roll up my sleeves and get stuff done often and fast, but I’ll also help you grow fast enough that an acquisition or hitting a revenue target becomes a possibility much sooner than you had originally anticipated.”

8. I have a unique skill that I didn’t mention yet

When you’re tasked with answering the question, why should we hire you, you can always introduce a new, unique skill you have that you haven’t mentioned yet. This can make the interview more compelling as they’re further learning more about you, while you share a unique benefit that makes you more qualified for a role.

“You should hire me for this role as a police officer, because I’m a trained black belt in jiu jitsu. I have experience knowing how much pressure to apply on a person in a situation to de-escalate an issue without causing bodily harm to a suspect. I also know how to safely defend myself without needing to resort to a weapon, unless absolutely necessary.”

9. We share the same values

If a company is asking you, “Why should we hire you” you can always tell them it’s because you share the same values or in other words, you’re a culture fit. You want to showcase how aligned you are to what the company stands for to ensure you’d get along just fine in the company. Maybe you’re a positive person or you just have that go-getter drive. Ultimately, the goal is to show that you would easily fit in at this company, and you’d get along with your new team members easily.

“You should hire me because I align well with your values. The one value I personally identify most with is “be data driven.” When working in my craft, all my decisions are made with real insights and data. I don’t work on projects that I would have fun doing, instead I approach priorities based on what customer needs are. Are there a ton of customer requests in one particular area? If so, I double down to deliver on it. Alternatively, I’ll look at data reports to see what the trends are to know what to focus on. If we’re getting all of our sales from a small segment of web pages, I’ll look for keywords on other relevant terms, so we can gain even more success while leaning into what’s already working.”

10. I’m very [customer/product/employee]-centric

When answering questions like “Why should we hire you” you want to double down on the company’s key focus. For most companies, they’re typically either customer-centric or product-centric. For example, Amazon is a customer first company, whereas many tech companies are product centric companies. A customer centric company is often one where customers are able to get refunds with ease, they don’t need to wait days for a reply to a support email, and the policies are made with serving customer needs instead of business needs. A product centric company is one where there’s a big engineering team to constantly debug, create new features, and build just an outstanding great product, like Apple during the Steve Jobs era.

“You should hire me because I’m obsessed with creating positive experiences for customers. In my previous support role, I was able to achieve the highest customer satisfaction score on my team by listening intently to the customers needs while ensuring people got the answers they needed fast. During my time as a support rep, I spent a ton of time studying the product to really know answers like the back of my hand. So, in addition to ensure that customers had positive experiences, they also had fast replies from me because of how much time I spent studying the product.”

Final Thoughts

Answering tough questions like these in an interview requires a bit of practice. If you’re currently interviewing, you can use Huntr to create tailored resumes, access mock interview questions, and more. Sign up for Huntr today!