Hiring managers will often ask graduates interviewing for a graduate program or graduate position what they can contribute to the company. This question allows interviewers to assess a graduate’s skills and strengths. A successful response to this question can highlight your value and the benefit that you can bring to the company. This article will provide advice on how to prepare a response to this question to impress interviewers. 

Why do interviewers ask this question?

While your education, experience and skills are important factors that employers consider when recruiting for a graduate program or hiring for a graduate position, your suitability to fit into the company culture is also vital. This means your ability to work cooperatively and efficiently alongside other employees and how you see yourself fitting in within the company and its values. Your response to this question will divulge your attitude towards teamwork, your work ethic and your ability to generate high quality work. 

How to answer this question?

Before stepping into an interview, you should consider this question carefully, reflect on your experience and achievements, and plan a response in advance. Here are some tips to follow when composing a response. 

Provide Examples

This question provides you with the perfect opportunity to discuss your accomplishments with the interviewer. This can show the interviewer that you have the skills to be a hard-working and valuable member of the company. When answering this question, you should cite a specific example from your work experience to demonstrate what knowledge or skills you used in the situation to promote success for the company. This should be a positive instance where you played a substantial role, such as major contributions to a project, initiating progress in the company, streamlining a system that promoted efficiency, representing the company in a way that increased its reputation, or contributing to an increase in revenue. 

The example should be specific and quantifiable so that the employer can see how your experience and skills can allow you to make equally successful contributions to the company in the new role. An unspecific or vague response to this question is unlikely to impress upon an employer your suitability regardless of your experience. Examples allow employers to visualise a graduate’s potential contributions to the company based on past outcomes.

Cite your Skills

Most graduate resumes have a section dedicated to the applicant’s skills. Read more about including skills on your graduate resume here. However, it is difficult for the employer to get a sense of your ability to utilise these skills in a practical context. 

You can use this question to talk more about the skills you mentioned on your resume with the interviewer. By linking the skills that you implemented in a past situation to garner success, you can demonstrate how these skills can also bring value to the company that you are interviewing for. When deciding on what skills to mention in your response, ensure that you use skills that are directly relevant and desirable for a candidate to have in the position that you are applying for. This can allow you to directly show the benefit that you will bring to the company. Try to also have a unique skill that you can mention as this can help you stand out. However, do not go overboard and mention a range of obscure skills that will have no use to the position or the company.

Link to the Company

Next, you can link how your contributions in your previous work experience demonstrate that you can make similar contributions in the role and for the company you are interviewing for. While it is essential to talk about your previous experience, remember that the question is directly asking what you can contribute to the company. You can answer this by first conducting research into the company’s goals and objectives and by reading the job description and selection criteria carefully. This will allow you to make direct inferences between your past experience and your capacity to make similar contributions in the future. You can link these contributions to the company’s overall aims for the quarter or year to demonstrate both the short-term and long-term benefits you can bring if successful for the position. This will show the interviewer that you are interested in being a productive employee in the company and are invested in the company's overall success and growth. 

Provide Evidence

While you can certainly provide examples of your past contributions and your skills to the interviewer, your answer will be more impressive if you can provide evidence that directly backs up your claims. This means statistics, figures, or data that shows the quantifiable extent of your contributions. This will prove to the interviewer that you have not elaborated the extent of your achievements. Using evidence also showcases your ability to meet or further the goals of your previous place of employment. 

Provide Ideas or Goals

If you do not have much work experience that you can use to answer this question, another approach is to include goals or ideas that you have and that you wish to action once you begin the position. These goals should align with the company’s values and targets, and with your job description. They should also be doable so that you do not accidentally set yourself up for failure and the employer up for disappointment. This approach to answering the question will inform the interviewer of your work ethic, creativity, strategic thinking, and the benefit that you can bring to the company. You should not merely state your goals but also describe how you plan to accomplish them and the results that they will bring. 

Examples

Graduate Administrative Assistant

While I was completing my business administration degree, I worked part-time at a consultancy firm scheduling meetings, drafting paperwork, and answering client queries. I noticed that the firm’s records were quite difficult to navigate as they had been sorely neglected over the years. I began composing a new filing system to organise the paperwork. After a few months, I had managed to organise two decades worth of paperwork. My supervisor said that because of my efforts, the productivity of the firm improved by 40% as everyone found it easier to navigate and were therefore saving time. I believe that this demonstrates my work ethic, strategic thinking, and patience, all key qualities that I can bring to this role. I am a problem-solver so I intend to contribute in any way that can make the working experience of my colleagues better. 

Graduate Economist

I believe that I am a hardworking individual who excels at problem solving. I can contribute to the economic research being conducted by the company. I specialised in international trade at university so my knowledge can be extremely beneficial for the team currently working on the South Asian economic project. I have experience conducting surveys and collecting and analysing data. At university, I worked as a research assistant for an economics professor and assisted them in their research which was in a similar field. I have extensive experience using different statistical tools that I can introduce into the workplace to increase efficiency and the accuracy of mathematical calculations.