What are your strengths — and how do I back them up?

Updated: 5 September 2026

In short

Name a task you demonstrably do well and attach the evidence to it in the same breath. The HR manual of the Canton of St.Gallen instructs managers not to ask this question at all — a strengths question is «usually well prepared and yields little» — and to ask instead about the tasks and activities the person did particularly well, and particularly liked, in the past. Two such tasks, each with a result someone else could confirm, are the whole answer.

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That is also why the question often does not arrive in its textbook form in Switzerland. What you actually hear is «What are you especially good at?», «Which tasks in your current job have you enjoyed most?» or «What do you bring that will help you do the tasks of this position well?». Those three sit in the same cantonal manual as recommended wordings, and they are all the strengths question. Answer them with three adjectives and you have technically replied while supplying nothing.

The second half of the question — how do you back it up — has an unusually concrete answer in Switzerland, because the other side already holds the evidence. The Code of Obligations gives every employee the right to a reference that speaks to «the quality of his work and his conduct», and that document is in the dossier before you walk in. A quality with no trace in your references is not a strong claim; it is an open question.

One more thing worth checking before you borrow words from the advert: a large share of the adjectives in a Swiss advert describe the employer, not the candidate. In English-language adverts in our index, of the mentions of «flexible» or «flexibility» that can be assigned to one side, 94.6 per cent sit on the employer’s side — flexible hours, flexible working models, a flexible workload. Offering that word back as a personal strength quotes a benefit.

Whose quality is it? Share of mentions on the employer’s side, English-language Swiss adverts

The higher the bar, the more often the word describes the employer rather than the person being sought. Counted on one advert per employer.

The official guidance to Swiss hiring managers in St.Gallen is to skip the strengths question and ask about past tasks instead — so prepare tasks, not adjectives.
The federal application checklist on arbeit.swiss never uses the word «strengths» in any of its four language versions. It lists «personal abilities and qualities (skills, character, ability to work in a team, self-perception, possibly leadership skills)».
Not every adjective in the advert is about you: in English-language Swiss adverts, flexibility sits on the employer’s side in 94.6 per cent of assignable mentions, independence in 43.5 and leadership in 41.3. Communication is the opposite — 6.2 per cent.
English-language adverts in Switzerland are the ones that most often name what the quality applies to: 53.8 per cent of candidate-side mentions carry an object, against 34.7 per cent in French and 20.1 per cent in German.
Proof, in Swiss terms, is a task plus a result plus someone who would confirm it. The reference letter and the named referees are part of the same process, not an afterthought.

The manual on the other side of the table says not to ask this question

The Canton of St.Gallen publishes its personnel manual, and one chapter covers questioning technique for job interviews. It is a service instruction to managers who hire, not advice literature, and on this question it is blunt: «Do not ask about strengths, this question is usually well prepared and yields little. Ask instead about the tasks and activities the person did particularly well and particularly liked in the past.» The manual is in German, which is worth saying plainly — it is a German-speaking canton’s document — but the practice it describes is the one you meet in English-language interviews in Zurich, Basel and Zug too, because the people conducting them were trained in this tradition.

The reasoning is set out one paragraph earlier. The manual accepts as normal that applicants present themselves in a positive light, and notes that statements about positive qualities are usually closer to reality than statements about weaknesses, though one «may have to factor in a certain degree of exaggeration». So the strengths question is not treated as an invitation to lie. It is treated as low-yield, and skipped.

The practical consequence changes the shape of your preparation. Do not rehearse an answer to «What are your strengths?»; assemble material that serves every substitute for it. The manual lists those substitutes as practice examples, and the closest one to the job you are applying for is: «What do you think you bring that will help you carry out the tasks of the advertised position successfully?»

The federal checklist calls it self-perception, not strength

The application tips on arbeit.swiss are the federal checklist a Swiss employment office hands out. They contain a preparation section for the interview, and one detail in it is telling: the word «strengths» does not appear. Not in English, and not in the German, French or Italian versions either — all four were checked.

What the page does list is a category. Under the employer’s typical questions it names «Your personal abilities and qualities (skills, character, ability to work in a team, self-perception, possibly leadership skills)». Self-perception is an item of its own, next to character. The German version says Selbsteinschätzung, the French one asks about your capacity «à vous évaluer vous-même», the Italian one says autovalutazione. Four languages, the same idea.

The distinction matters more than it looks. A strength is a claim about you; a self-perception is a claim about you that can be compared with something. Swiss interviews treat it as the second kind. That is why the risky answer is not the modest one but the uncalibrated one: someone who claims «advanced Excel» and then stalls on a pivot table has not overstated one skill, they have devalued the whole self-assessment — and with it the parts that were true.

Which adjectives in the advert are actually about the employer

The obvious preparation trick is to mirror the advert’s adjectives back in the interview. It works less well than it looks, for a reason that can be counted. We went through the English-language adverts in our index sentence by sentence, asking which side of the table each quality word sits on: a demand made of you, or a description of what the employer provides and what its own team is like.

The split is stark. Flexibility sits on the employer’s side in 94.6 per cent of assignable mentions — it is a benefit, not a requirement, in almost every English-language Swiss advert that uses the word. Independence and autonomy follow at 43.5 per cent, because «the role offers autonomy» is a standard line in the offer block, and leadership at 41.3 per cent, where it usually describes the management culture rather than a demand. Communication is the mirror image: only 6.2 per cent employer-side, which makes it one of the few adjectives that reliably means «we will test this».

So the rule of thumb is not «use the advert’s words». It is «use the advert’s words that are on your side of the table». If the posting says flexible three times and communication once, the one worth preparing an example for is communication.

English-language adverts set the higher bar for evidence

A second count explains why a bare adjective lands so poorly in this market. When an advert names a quality as a requirement, does the same sentence say what the quality applies to — a number, a customer group, a department, a system, a shift, a deadline? In English-language Swiss adverts it does in 53.8 per cent of cases. In French-language adverts, 34.7 per cent. In German-language adverts, 20.1 per cent.

Applying in English in Switzerland therefore means two things at once. The advert is more likely to have told you what the quality is for — «clear communication in a cross-disciplinary lab environment», «attention to detail with serial interfaces» — so there is less guesswork about which example to bring. And the same convention runs the other way: an answer that names no object is more conspicuous, because the text you are answering did name one.

The practical move is small. Take the requirement line, keep its object, and replace its adjective with your task. «Strong communication in a cross-functional setting» becomes «I run the Monday handover between the lab and the production team — twelve people, two languages, and I write the summary that both sides work from.»

The three-part answer, and how long it should run

A workable answer has three parts and takes about forty seconds. First the task, not the quality: «I own the release notes for our platform.» Then the result, as concrete as confidentiality allows: «Since I took it over they go out with the release instead of two days later, and support stopped getting the same three questions after every deployment.» Then the transfer: «Your advert lists exactly this handover, which is why I picked it.»

Two blocks like that answer the whole question. A third works against the second — someone who is good at everything has said nothing. And the selection is made by the advert, not by your self-image: of the two or three requirements it phrases as hard ones, take those for which you have a task with a result.

Numbers are strong but not mandatory, and confidentiality comes first. A relative figure — «about a third less rework», «from two weeks to three days» — carries as much weight as an absolute one and keeps you away from your current employer’s business secrets. Where no number is possible, a checkable fact takes its place: that you trained the two new joiners, that the process is written down since you did it, that you are the named deputy.

A worked example, and the same strength wasted

The setting: a project coordinator role. The advert asks for organisational skills, stakeholder communication and the ability to work independently, and — like most — attaches no object to any of them.

The version that holds: «The part I am best at is keeping a project honest about its dates. In my current role I run the weekly status for four workstreams, and I changed the format so that every line carries a named owner and a date rather than a colour. The first month was uncomfortable because three items had no owner at all. Since then the steering group stopped asking for interim updates, because the sheet answers them. The second thing is the handover to operations — I write it, and the last two went live without a rollback. Your advert names both, which is why I picked those two.»

The same person, the same strengths, unusable: «My strengths are organisation, communication and flexibility. I work in a very structured way and I am resilient under pressure.» Five adjectives, no object, no situation, no result. It is not wrong; it is unverifiable — and next to two other candidates using the same five words, it simply drops out of the comparison.

What counts as proof in a Swiss process

The evidence question has an institutional answer here. Article 330a of the Code of Obligations entitles an employee, at any time, to a reference «concerning the nature and the duration of the employment relationship, the quality of his work and his conduct». The two things this interview question is about are therefore already written down, in a document the hiring side has read before meeting you.

Two consequences follow. Your choice of strengths should leave a trace in those references — not the same word, since Swiss reference letters have a language of their own, but the activity should be visible there. Describing yourself as a natural leader when no reference mentions a leadership task invites a follow-up you did not want. And the part of your work that came out thin in the reference is exactly the part your spoken example has to fill.

Then there are the referees themselves. The federal checklist notes that a CV normally states that references will be provided on request, and that a separate sheet of referees can be handed over during the interview. In French-speaking Switzerland the question is on the standard list: the Canton of Vaud brochure asks, under «Références et salaire», who could give references about you. Before you claim a strength, know who would confirm it — and ideally be able to name that person in the same conversation.

Three ways this answer regularly fails

The adjective chain. Three to five quality words in a row, no object, no case. It feels complete because it covers a lot, and it is precisely why the St.Gallen manual rates the question as low-yield.

Mirroring the advert without checking sides. Copy the posting’s adjectives literally and, on the most common ones — flexibility, autonomy, leadership — you have a good chance of repeating a sentence in which the employer was describing itself. That does not read as tailored; it reads as inattentive.

The strength with no connection to the role. A real, well-evidenced ability that the requirement profile does not mention is a detour, and it occupies the space the relevant strength needed. If you are unsure which requirement is genuinely hard, read the advert once for its signal words — required, mandatory, essential against an asset, ideally, preferably. Your two examples belong to the first group.

Market figures come from a count of the Swiss adverts open on SwissJobs.app on 5 September 2026. The basis is the short description held for each advert; the language is determined from that text rather than from the source’s own field. Apprenticeships, internships and trainee programmes are excluded, because they name qualities differently from posts for experienced hires. One advert per employer is counted, so that a single large advertiser cannot carry a rate; the count across all adverts gives the same ranking within a few points (flexibility 88.6, independence 42.2, leadership 35.0, communication 4.7). A mention is assigned to the employer’s or the candidate’s side by signal words in the same sentence (offers, benefits, package against required, we are looking for, your profile, must have); sentences with no such signal stay unclassified and count towards neither share. Bases differ by term: communication is the most frequent and flexibility the second, while the leadership and independence figures rest on a few dozen assignable mentions each, which is why only terms with an adequate base are shown. An «object» means a number, a customer group, a department, a system, a shift or a deadline in the same sentence; counting a named language as an object raises the three shares to 63.1, 42.1 and 29.9 per cent. Short descriptions summarise the original advert, so every share is a lower rather than an upper bound. The official wordings were read on 5 September 2026: the Canton of St.Gallen personnel manual chapter 80.2 (German), the arbeit.swiss application tips in all four language versions, the Canton of Vaud interview brochure (French) and the Code of Obligations in the version of 1 January 2026 on fedlex.admin.ch.

Practise the strengths question against your advert

Sources

What our job index says about the Swiss market

Computed live from our own index, not quoted from a study. Shares only, as of today.

Language the advert is written in

Deutsch: 60%
English: 23%
Français: 13%
Italiano: 3%

Of adverts that state a language requirement, the share asking for

Deutsch: 70%
English: 43%
Français: 21%
Italiano: 3%

19% posted in the last 7 days · Largest markets: Zürich 18% · Bern 10% · Genève 5% · Basel 5%