How to answer “What makes you unique?”

Preparation is without a doubt the most important piece of the job-searching puzzle, and answering this question is no different.

Below we’ve outlined the steps you should take so you can knock this out of the park and get the job.

Don’t shortcut or skip any of these. They are extremely important and will serve you well when nerves are running a bit higher than normal (interviewing is stressful).

Understand the role you’re applying for

This is the first step to sharing what makes you unique when it comes to the job you’re applying for. If you don’t have a thorough understanding of the role, it’s going to be extremely challenging to convey why you’re the perfect candidate for the job.

The first place to start is by making sure that you’re familiar with the job description and the skills that it will require. Most of the time you can find this on the actual job posting page, but if you have any other information available you should use that as well.

Why would you want to do this?

This information will give you a great opportunity to tie in any other skills and experience you have with other roles. If you’re applying for a marketing position and will be interacting with the company web developers often, sharing your basic code knowledge will be an asset.

Remember, your interviewer is thinking of the big picture when they ask “What makes you unique.”

Showing you’re not only a perfect fit when it comes to daily responsibilities but that you can also fit into the entire operation seamlessly is how you win the job.

Outside of that, making sure you’re familiar with the company as a whole is obviously important as well. But you should already know that.

Be ready to speak on some unique aspects of your personality as well

This is a part of your answer that you might not get to, but you want to be prepared for.

We recommend using this as a complementary way of differentiating yourself after you have explained the most important aspects of what makes you unique. It should be short and sweet.

The most important aspect to remember is to make sure it relates back to the job. The fact that you prefer to cut your peanut butter sandwich into eight pieces before eating it is not what we’re looking for here.

A good example of this could be talking about how you’re naturally curious and enjoy tackling projects where you need to learn as you go. This would apply quite nicely to almost any job.

Sometimes people struggle with this because they think they’re rather unremarkable. That’s why it’s so tricky.

We undervalue a lot of the interesting things about ourselves because they’re normal to us.

If you really get stuck and can’t come up with anything, a good fallback is anything about work ethic. You will want to jazz it up a little bit (more on that in a moment), but it’s going to be hard for a interviewer to dislike that portion of your answer.