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How Knowing Strengths Makes You a Stronger Candidate, with Kristie Steele

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Job seekers oftentimes are hesitant to share their strengths for fear of bragging, and we sometimes focus more on our weaknesses than what we’re naturally good at. But you need to show a potential employer how your strengths will benefit their company, says Find Your Dream Job guest Kristie Steele. Kristie says the best way to do that is by sharing stories of how those strengths have helped you in previous jobs. Asking friends, family, and coworkers what they see as your strengths is another way to get clarity on what you have to offer in a new position.

About Our Guest:

Kristie Steele is a senior human resources manager at Forth. It’s a nonprofit working to electrify transportation.

Resources in This Episode:

Transcript

Find Your Dream Job, Episode 424:

How Knowing Strengths Makes You a Stronger Candidate, with Kristie Steele

Airdate: November 8, 2023

Mac Prichard:

This is Find Your Dream Job, the podcast that helps you get hired, have the career you want, and make a difference in life.

I’m your host, Mac Prichard. I’m also the founder of Mac’s List. It’s a job board in the Pacific Northwest that helps you find a fulfilling career.

Every Wednesday, I talk to a different expert about the tools you need to get the work you want.

Find Your Dream Job is brought to you by TopResume. TopResume has helped more than 400,000 professionals land more interviews and get hired faster.

Get a free review of your resume today.

Go to macslist.org/topresume.

An interview gives you the chance to show why you’re the right person for the job.

And when you focus on your strengths as you make your case, you’re more confident, energetic, and persuasive.

Kristie Steele is here to talk about how knowing your strengths makes you a stronger candidate.

She’s a senior human resources manager at Forth. It’s a nonprofit working to electrify transportation.

Kristie has spent her career at mission-centered organizations. She’s also a Gallup-certified strengths coach.

She joins us from Eugene, Oregon.

Well, let’s get going, Kristie. Why is it important to understand your strengths when you look for work?

Kristie Steele:

It helps you to show that you are a great candidate for the role, and it helps you to determine whether the role and the organization are a good candidate for you. So, for yourself, if you can explain your strengths and how they tie to the role, that’s really important. But there’s also decades of research that show that people who invest in their strengths and their natural talents, they perform better, and employers know that.

So, if you are aware of your strengths, and you can show that in your cover letter and in your interview, then they’re gonna see you as more likely to be a top performer and a better collaborator. It hits different areas of performance.

Mac Prichard:

You’re a Human Resources Manager. You read applications regularly, cover letters, and resumes. You talk to people in interviews. In your experience, do most candidates understand their strengths? And are they communicating those?

Kristie Steele:

Probably not most of them, no. I think a lot of people may have some ideas, but it’s not super clear for them.

Mac Prichard:

Why do you think that happens, Kristie? Why aren’t applicants both understanding and emphasizing their strengths in their application materials and in their interviews?

Kristie Steele:

I think a lot of people aren’t understanding the value of strengths, and maybe they aren’t familiar with what a selling point it is, and it’s just not been the way that we’ve done business for most of the history of companies, but that’s beginning to change, thankfully.

Mac Prichard:

And why do you think that’s changing? What’s happening?

Kristie Steele:

Well, there’s been so much research over the past forty to fifty years that just keeps confirming again and again that if we invest time in developing our natural talents into strengths, that same amount of time compared to investing it in fixing a weakness, it’s gonna return so much more if we spend it on our natural talents.

We get so much more out of it, and it contributes to us being better performers, being happier. You just feel like you had a better day when you get to work using your strengths, and there’s tons of benefits from it, and they’re real tangible benefits that hit the bottom line, so it’s not just feel-good stuff. It actually makes profit. So, it’s a win-win, really.

Mac Prichard:

When you get an application from a candidate who understands her or his strengths, what does that look like? What makes it stand out from the others that you’re looking at?

Kristie Steele:

It can be very explicit. Sometimes, people will actually list their strengths on their resume and then, in the cover letter, tie at least one or two strengths to the role, and I highly recommend doing that. That is definitely part of what contributed to me getting my current role at Forth.

And sometimes, it’s not quite that explicit, but I can see the person has applied their strengths and accomplished a lot. That’s another way it comes through is when people are listing their accomplishments and not just their job duties that they held at each position.

Mac Prichard:

You mentioned that connection between listing your strengths and then seeing the accomplishments in the application materials, perhaps in the resume.

What are other things that you see, perhaps, in the application or in the interview when people emphasize their strengths that are persuasive to you as a hiring manager?

Kristie Steele:

When someone is able to share stories of how they have used their strengths to accomplish their goals or make an impact for their organization in the past, that tells me that they know how to do that and they can do it again.

Mac Prichard:

You mentioned earlier that some companies may not still understand the value of hiring workers who understand their strengths.

What would you say to a listener who thinks, well, if I were applying for a job with Forth, that might be an effective approach, but what if I’m applying with an organization that doesn’t have that understanding? Do you still think it’s effective, Kristie, to emphasize your strengths as the candidate?

Kristie Steele:

It’s always going to be your selling point. Whether or not somebody knows the research and understands the value that a strengths-aware employee can bring, they’re still gonna have the experience of seeing that you are speaking well of what you can do for the organization if you can talk about your strengths.

And I would just say, I want to encourage people also to consider looking for organizations that have awareness around it because I believe that those organizations are providing a better experience for their employees because the strengths approach, it requires the organization to appreciate the unique contributions each person has to make and, therefore, they value the people more.

So, they just take better care of their people and treat them with respect. So, I know not everybody is going to prioritize that, but I just want to encourage you to do that for yourself.

Mac Prichard:

Well, good tip. Well, let’s talk about how you can get clear about your strengths when you do look for work, Kristie. How do you recommend getting started? Should you use a self-assessment tool, for example?

Kristie Steele:

Absolutely, that’s one way to do it. I’m, of course, being a Gallup Certified strengths coach, I’m a big fan of Clifton Strengths, and there’s a lot of benefits that come from using a tool like that. Not only because it can help you discover what your talents are, but it will provide a report right away that helps you understand them better and gives you ideas for how to develop them. It provides a whole framework for getting to know other people’s strengths. And it’s helpful not just to know your own, but that of your colleagues as well.

And then, Gallup, in particular, does ongoing research that just provides more value for this. For instance, they recently published study results showing how we can leverage our strengths to reduce burnout. So there’s just a lot you gain out of using a tool like that.

But you can also work with a coach. Coaches – many of them are great at helping you discover and develop your strengths.

And then, lastly, there’s the do-it-yourself way. You can just ask the people who are close to you or ask yourself a few key questions to figure it out yourself. Some questions that you could try are: what are the two to three things you do best? Or what activities leave you feeling energized? And what just comes really easily and naturally to you, even before someone showed you how to do it?

Mac Prichard:

Well, terrific. Let’s take a break, Kristie. And stay with us. When we come back, Kristie Steele will continue to share her advice on how knowing your strengths makes you a stronger candidate.

Your resume offers a great way to show your strengths.

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Now, let’s get back to the show.

We’re back in the Mac’s List studio. I’m talking with Kristie Steele.

She’s a senior human resources manager at Forth. It’s a nonprofit working to electrify transportation.

Kristie has spent her career at mission-centered organizations. She’s also a Gallup-certified strengths coach.

Kristie joins us from Eugene, Oregon.

Now, Kristie, before the break, we were talking about how knowing your strengths makes you a stronger candidate, and we were talking at the end of the first segment about how to get started, and we were talking about self-assessment, and there were three steps you recommended a listener could take.

You could use a self-assessment tool like Cliffton’s Strength Finder. You could work with a coach. Or you could ask friends and family, people who know you well, about your strengths.

What do you do next, Kristie? What do you do with this information? And how do you apply it to your job search?

Kristie Steele:

In preparation or just ongoing, really, you want to develop your strengths. So those questions that I suggested or the assessment, they’ll help you uncover your natural talents, and through time and effort, we develop those talents into strengths.

So, I definitely encourage people to just continually learn and practice and pay attention to the strengths because that will help you start to collect stories about, oh wow, when I used that strength on that project, it really helped me break through this difficult obstacle and achieve this great thing. And if you can collect those stories, that’s what’s going to help you during job interviews and writing cover letters.

Mac Prichard:

Another suggestion I know you have for using your strengths well during a job search is to remember to give yourself permission to focus and develop your strengths.

Can you talk more about that, Kristie? What stops people from developing their strengths? And how does that happen?

Kristie Steele:

Well, we’re all busy. But there’s also, I think, this sort of monkey mind of the negative thoughts that tell us that we’re not worth it or putting others first or just other things before our own self-development. So, yeah, that’s an important first step, to just decide that you’re worth investing time and energy into becoming the best version of yourself.

Mac Prichard:

How do you see people do that? I know, in addition to being a Human Resources Manager, you’re a Gallup-certified strengths coach. What works well with people who do want to focus on and develop their strengths? What are they doing on a daily or regular basis?

Kristie Steele:

It depends on your strengths. The different sort of strategies might work best for different people.

For myself, one thing that has helped me is to choose a strength theme to focus on for a week or a month and maybe do a little bit of reading about it or try to implement a new practice around it, like a mini-project to help me practice that strength. And then the next month, switch to a new one where I’m just like carving out a little bit of time each day or each week to think about it, to read about it, to practice it.

Mac Prichard:

Another piece of advice I know that you share when thinking about your strengths and how to use them or emphasize them, rather, in a job search, is to consider what might be stopping you from using your strengths.

What are common failures that you see people struggle with, Kristie, that prevent them from using their strengths?

Kristie Steele:

I think we naturally have this idea that it makes more sense to fix our weaknesses. We’re already good at that thing. So we don’t need to work on it. And so, flipping that switch and realizing that we’ll get more out of working on what we’re already good at and that we can use that, actually, more effectively sometimes to manage the weak areas.

If I could share a little quick story here about that. The Clifton Strengths breaks down into four main categories, and each category is called a domain. It describes how people typically use those strengths, and one of them is called Executing. It’s about getting things done.

I had a colleague who was just incredible at getting so much done, and when we did the strengths assessment at that company, I was shocked to see that she did not have any executing things in her top five. And when I asked her about this, she just shared, well, I use this other strength to trick myself into getting things done.

So, you can develop the strengths and talents that you have, that you’re naturally good at, to the point that they help you overcome and manage the weaker areas in a way that actually, you probably enjoy. And it might work better than just trying to fix that thing that you’re naturally not that great at. You’re not ever going to get as good at it as the thing that you’re naturally good at.

Mac Prichard:

Terrific. You talked earlier about the importance of having stories that would illustrate your strengths that you could use in application materials and interviews. I know you’re also a big fan of practicing those stories.

How do you recommend people prepare and practice stories about their strengths in a way that’s going to be appealing to hiring managers?

Kristie Steele:

Yeah, I think it really helps to take a few notes, at least, or have a list of stories that you might use and the strengths you’re going to tie them to. And then, just practice telling them out loud. You can have somebody listen and give you feedback or not.

But practicing saying it out loud, I think, will help you get comfortable sharing the story, and if you run through it a few times, then you’ll start to sound really confident as you share it, and that also, I think, is, for better or worse, something that is really helpful during an interview, is to sound confident.

Mac Prichard:

Finally, Kristie, how do you recommend people choose the strengths that they emphasize when they’re doing a job search? We all have many talents. What’s going to matter the most to an employer like you, who’s looking at a cover letter or interviewing a candidate?

Kristie Steele:

If there’s a clear match between the strengths needed to excel in the role and the strengths that the job candidate has, and then they show up, and they’re drawing that connection and telling the stories, and sort of proving that theory I have as the interviewer, that I think this person has the strengths needed for the role, and then they come and tell me the stories to prove it, that really kind of seals the deal in my mind. It makes it very clear to me that the person is a very strong candidate.

Mac Prichard:

What would you recommend a candidate do in preparation for putting together that application or getting ready for that interview? They’ve got their strengths, perhaps have access to a job description. How would you suggest an applicant put it all together so they can make that connection that’s gonna be persuasive to you as a hiring manager?

Kristie Steele:

Look for what seems like the most important parts of that job. What are you going to be spending the most time on if you take this job? And then, consider what strengths you have that will support your success at those parts of the job.

If you’re having trouble answering that, then it might not be the right job. But if that seems clear to you, then just dig into that and start thinking of the stories you can share that show that connection.

Mac Prichard:

Besides looking at a job description or perhaps a website, is there any other research you would recommend a candidate do in order to make those connections between the applicant’s strengths and the needs of the employer?

Kristie Steele:

You can always learn a lot by talking to other people who’ve worked at the organization or other people who’ve held similar roles at other organizations if it’s a new role to you, especially. That can be really important to make sure that you have a clear understanding of the role you’re applying for, and it’s always, I find it helpful to read reviews online, as well, of the organization, and sometimes you can learn about the role.

I’ve even looked up the LinkedIn profiles of who held this role in the past of this organization. And what do they have in their LinkedIn that tells me what their strengths are? To see if I can glean from that what type of person might be good in this role.

Mac Prichard:

Well, it’s been a terrific conversation, Kristie. Now, tell us, what’s next for you?

Kristie Steele:

Well, I am full-time at Forth, and they were actually interested in and already doing a little bit of work with Cliffton Strength before I started there. So, part of my role is to just really take that further with this team.

And I’ll soon be developing a program that sort of brings new hires into the fold and helps them discover their strengths and learn the importance of them, just like we’ve already done with the team that’s already here. And then, also, a program to help team leaders how to take a strengths-based approach with their team members and really coach them to develop their strengths. So, I’m excited about those projects coming up.

Mac Prichard:

I know listeners can learn more about Forth and your work there by visiting the Forth website. That URL is forthmobility.org, and that you also invite listeners to connect with you on LinkedIn. As always, I hope they’ll mention they heard you on Find Your Dream Job when they do reach out to you.

Now, Kristie, given all of the great advice you’ve shared today, what’s the one thing you want a listener to remember about how knowing your strengths makes you a stronger candidate?

Kristie Steele:

Continuous development of your strengths is the most effective way to become the best version of yourself. So, just keep learning and practicing. Know yourself. Develop yourself. And that will help you at work, as well as in your personal life, projects, and relationships, as well. You’ll be happier, as well as more successful and a stronger candidate.

Mac Prichard:

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Next week, our guest will be Nick Poloni.

He’s the head of recruitment at Cascadia Search Group.

Nick is also an executive recruiter in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries.

Recruiters like Nick look at LinkedIn every day in search of candidates.

Some pages catch his eye, others do not.

Wouldn’t you like to know what you can do to get his attention?

Join us next Wednesday when Nick Poloni and talk about how to make your LinkedIn profile stand out to a recruiter.

Until next time, thanks for letting us help you find your dream job.

This show is produced by Mac’s List.

Susan Thornton-Hough schedules our guests and writes our newsletter. Lisa Kislingbury Anderson manages our social media.

Our sound engineer is Matt Fiorillo. Ryan Morrison at Podfly Productions edits the show. Dawn Mole creates our transcripts. And our music is by Freddy Trujillo.

This is Mac Prichard. See you next week.