What are Your Greatest Strengths - 3 Mistakes to Avoid!
About this video
Jeff Su explains three mistakes to avoid when answering ‘What are your greatest strengths?’ First, the creator advises not to name a hard or technical skill (e.g., Excel, PowerPoint, Salesforce, or Monday.com), because the role may evolve away from that tool, the company may use an alternative like Notion or Asana, and longer-tenured staff may know it better, making the claim sound presumptuous. Instead, he recommends preparing transferable skills that apply across responsibilities and grow with you — for example, honesty and respect for others for an entry-level account manager role that later becomes a people-manager role. Second, he warns against naming a strength irrelevant to the role, such as creative thinking for accounting, even with a strong story, because it signals poor research. He suggests finding relevant strengths not mainly from the vague job description but by asking someone already working there what made a recent hire they enjoyed working with stand out. Third, he cautions against relying completely on STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Results) and instead adding Learnings via CARL, illustrating with his own earlier answer about strong communication skills at Ernst & Young, where he influenced a CFO and ground staff at a large advertising client in Shanghai to adopt a less extreme plan that reduced compliance issues — and says he should have closed by explicitly linking the learning back to that strength.
Key takeaways
- Do not name a hard/technical skill as your greatest strength — the tool may become irrelevant, the company may use an alternative, and others may know it better.
- Choose transferable skills instead, such as honesty and respect, that apply across responsibilities and still matter as you progress to managing people.
- Make the strength directly relevant to the target role, so the interviewer connects you to high performers already on their team.
- Find relevant strengths by asking an insider what made a recent hire they enjoyed working with stand out, rather than relying only on a vague job description.
- Use CARL over pure STAR for reflective questions: add an explicit Learnings close that ties the story back to the strength you claimed.
Episode details: published November 4, 2020 · 7:20 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Jeff Su’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.
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