Self-Assessment

The role of self-assessment

First and foremost, to be able to interview with confidence, it is important to know yourself. By conducting self-assessment, you will be able to find out what your selling point is, such as why you are the best fit for a company. Especially for current students who have no previous work experience, you may be thinking about where you are going to be or what you are going to be doing after graduation, and you may have no idea what it is that you want to do. You will get stuck just vaguely thinking about it, so the first thing you should do is look back before thinking about the future. You may be able to get some hints from your past experiences and there could be unexpected discoveries when you self-reflect. It is said that the foundation of job hunting is from self-assessment. However, self-assessment is not just limited to job hunting. It is the basis for facing the future.

Begin by looking at your past self

First, look back on your life and organize your experiences. Go all the way to your childhood and think about how you came to be the way you are now. You may be able to see how your current personality and values have been formed through various experiences.

There are various ways to organize your history, and there is no one particular way to go about it. One idea would be to make a chronology of your life. Detail all the happy and successful accomplishments, as well as your difficult and challenging experiences from when you were little to now. Also, understand your family composition and relations, and other environments and experiences that inspired you to be interested in certain activities and have shaped your character. Be specific.

Example 1:
Throughout elementary school, I was always competitive with my brother who was only a year younger than me. I remember a particular incident when I felt very envious when my brother was admired for his drawing more than me. I drew so many pictures until I was praised as well. Even to this day, I remain highly competitive, and I never quit anything until I come in first place.

Example 2:
In high school, I was involved in an extracurricular activity that worked with various environmental issues. One particular example was my involvement in a project that dealt with cleaning up a lake. We lived around the lake and listened to and worked with the neighbors in thinking of several solutions, and conducted a presentation. I never considered environmental issues before, but after this experience, I became highly conscious of companies that deal with such environmental issues.

new discoveries when looking back. be specific.

When you look back on your experiences, try to always think about why you liked it, why you were interested, and why you were good at it. By doing so, you will also be able to see your own strengths and weaknesses. Writing everything out in detail is a way to practice how to be able to convey your own enthusiasm when job hunting. Be as specific as possible, and think of many examples. It may seem like work now, but it will prove useful when you are asked these same questions at your interviews.

Simply stating that you are 120% motivated, you are interested in the job, or that you are good at something more than others will not be convincing to the recruiter since they don’t know you. Lessons and teachings are more convincing with a great story or reason to back it up with. Have stories and examples from your own past experiences to support your interests, so recruiters may actually visualize and imagine how passionate you are. (Even if it was a trigger at the time of childhood, it is more persuasive to speak as recently as possible about episodes)