Two things here. First the interviewer may or may not have been playing you with his reaction to see how you responded to the stress of feeling your answer was incorrect. Remember anytime an interviewer pushes back like this he is also assessing your ability to handle stress (As well as he might be trying to get a different answer from you). He may not have been as unhappy with your answer as he indicated. If you keep that in mind, it is less stressful in an interview when they do this to you.
On the other had there is a big difference between what are your strengths and what makes you so special that I should hire you. The difference is showing what you have accomplished using those strengths and what you personally can bring to the company that will be of value to them. This question should be to be answered in business terms not general terms.
Suppose you are interviewing 20 people and you ask this question and 19 of them say they are fast learners, team players etc. The 20th says, "You should hire me because in my last job I saved the company $100,000 by doing XYZ and in the job before that, my ABC project took the time to process a widget from 1 hour to ten minutes thus saving 1000 manhours a year. And I can help your company out because of my skill with GHI and LMNOP."
Which one impressed you more? Always remember an interview situation is a competion and your answers are being judged in relationship to what the other people being interviewed also say.
Having asked this particular question many times, I can tell you that approximately 99.5% of people answer the way you did. This is one of the the best questions to really make yourself shine over other candidates. It is what separates the achievers from the rest of the pack. Think in terms of money saved, time saved, positive changes to the organization (things like get others to start doing unit tests as an example), how well you met deadlines and things you did that others were not able to successfully do.
manpreet![Tuteehub forum best answer]()
Best Answer
2 years ago
In an interview the HR interviewer asked me the following question:
I was prepared for the classic "Mention some of your strengths" and its sibling "Mention some of your weaknesses", so I began talking about my strengths with examples from my past experience.
The problem is every time I talked about one of my strengths the interviewer would reply:
For example, I mentioned that I'm a fast learner, hard worker, love programming, team player each with an example from my past.
However, the HR interviewer made it sound like its normal to have all these characteristics.
What do you do in such situation?