Resume tower · floor

Why should we hire you, and where the answer is written down

Why should we hire you sounds like a challenge, which is why it produces so many bad answers. People hear it as an invitation to argue their own case and start listing qualities, and the result is a paragraph of adjectives that could describe anybody in the building.

A public careers service classifies it differently, and the classification does most of the work.

That reframing removes the pressure and replaces it with a task. The question is not “convince me”. It is “which of your strengths did you decide were the relevant ones” — and it is testing whether you understood the job well enough to choose.

Which means the answer exists before the interview, in a document you already have.

Why the examples matter more than the claims. Every candidate says they are organised, reliable and a good communicator. Those words carry no information because nobody says the opposite. An example carries information because it could have gone differently. If you find yourself asserting a quality, stop and replace it with the thing that happened.

The structure for those examples is published by the same source and is worth using here even though it was written for behavioural questions: situation, task, action, result — “and what you learned from the experience”. Keep it short. This question wants two or three compact examples, not one long story.

The three ways this answer usually goes wrong. First, listing qualities instead of evidence, which is the default failure. Second, describing why you want the job — that is a different question and answering it here wastes your best moment on your own motives rather than their problem. Third, comparing yourself to other candidates, which you cannot do because you have not met them, and which reads as bravado rather than confidence.

What to do when you are underqualified on paper. Some readers arrive at this question knowing they do not meet every requirement. The honest move is not to pretend otherwise but to be precise about which parts you do meet, with evidence, and to name the gap once with what you are doing about it. That is the same two-part structure that works for the weaknesses question, and it works here for the same reason: an accurate self-assessment is itself the quality being tested.

A note on the sources, since there are few. The classification and the guidance on how many examples to prepare come from a national careers service with nothing to sell. The instruction to use the employer’s own vocabulary is quoted from a United States government application system, where it is written about résumés rather than interviews — we have extended it to spoken answers, and that extension is our judgement rather than theirs. The rest of the structure is ours too, built from those pieces, and the page says so rather than presenting it as received wisdom.

What this tower will not do

It will not give you a script. The answer is built from one specific job advert and your own examples, and a general answer to this question is the failure mode rather than the goal.

It will not tell you to compare yourself with the other candidates. You have not met them, and the attempt reads as bravado to the one person in the room who has.

And it will not sell you interview coaching, which — given that two of the first five results are recruitment agencies — is worth saying on this question in particular. What holds instead is simple: the classification of this question and the guidance on examples are quoted from a public careers service, and the parts extended from a government application system or built by us are marked in the text.