Becoming visible in your job search and your career

4. How to sell your gifts

Selling yourself isn't always easy but you also have so many characteristics and skills then you even realized and I bet you aren't naming half of them.  Learn how to emphasize both your soft skills and your hard skills and prepare yourself to be a stand out in the interview.

To learn how to ace the interview take the Boost Your Confidence Course BeConfident.me

When you are thinking about your strengths and preparing your resume, your video intro and preparing for interviews you want to have a clear idea of what your gifts are. When I say gifts I am talking about, what are you naturally good at?  How do people describe you?  What has been part of your personality since you were young?  How can you use these things to describe your strengths?  Remember these are different from hard skills which are things like coding, working with excel sheets, project management, being an AI annotator, being a video editor, being a social media coordinator, customer service troubleshooting etc.  Hard skills are learned skills. Soft skills are things that you are naturally good at and may have honed over the years.  

For example, are you a good problem solver? Are you solution oriented? Are you good with people?  Are you a collaborator? Are you fair minded?  Are you analytical? Are you detail oriented? Are you creative?  Are you a big picture person and a big thinker?  Are you good at explaining things and simplifying complex concepts? Are you patient?   Are you good at working independently with little direction?  Are you motivated and a self starter?  

These are all examples of strengths that you may not think about immediately because they are just part of you! But you can use these things to describe your strengths in interviews. These are also things that you want to specifically highlight in your summary description and on your resume, in your video introduction, in your overall self description or personal brand statement, on your linkedin profile summary and in preparing for interview responses.

I want you to genuinely think about yourself as a whole person and spend some time really appreciating all of your great gifts.  Write them all down in two columns.  One column for your soft skills and the other for your hard skills.   Start working on your personal brand statement and description. How would you describe yourself in a couple of sentences if you were to answer the “Tell me about yourself” question.  You want it to be succinct but it should clearly describe what is unique about you.  

Part of being confident is believing in yourself. If you believe in yourself, you will come across confidently and other people will believe in you.   Practice talking about yourself and selling your strengths with confidence and with authenticity.  Get excited about who you are and what you bring to the table.  Really understand yourself and believe in the value you offer. And, remember that confidence, authenticity and enthusiasm go a long way with interviewers.  It can make the difference between landing the job or not.

If you want a deeper dive into this topic and learn everything you need to know about interview preparation, check out our Boost Your Confidence for the Job Interview course at beconfident.me

See you in the next lesson!