Finding and Explaining Your Strengths

by Jennifer Crutchfield, Head Editor, INALJ Connecticut

Finding and Explaining Your Strengths

headshotFinding your strengths and knowing how to explain them can be an excellent resource in finding a new job. It may seem like a simple idea, but I find that during hard times, it is easy to forget what you’re good at and focus on the negative. Maybe you are having a hard time focusing on what skills you have to offer.  Sometimes I can be good at finding examples of things I do well, but need assistance on how to I create an overall picture of what I’m good at.

A tool that I found useful for this very topic is StrengthsFinder 2.0.

  • You first take a short quiz, which will help gauge what your best qualities are.  One of my strengths is that I am a “learner”. Being a ‘learner’ means that I “have a great desire to learn and want to continuously improve. In particular, the process of learning, rather than the outcome, excites them.”
  • Knowing that I’m a good “learner” will help me in my interview process when I am asked questions like, “What are your strengths?” I can come up with a great answer using any of the strength attributes shown to me through StrengthsFinder.

I did not have this tool when applying for my recent job, but I feel like it may have made preparing for my interview process a little easier.

Naomi House

Naomi House, MLIS, is the founder and publisher of the popular webzine and jobs list INALJ.com (formerly I Need a Library Job) and former CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) of T160K.org, a crowdfunding platform focused on African patrimony, heritage and cultural projects. INALJ was founded in October 2010 with the assistance of her fellow Rutgers classmate, Elizabeth Leonard. Its social media presence has grown to include Facebook (retired in 2016), Twitter and a LinkedIn group, in addition to the interviews, articles and jobs found on INALJ. INALJ has had over 21 Million page hits and helped many, many thousands of librarians find employment! Through grassroots marketing, word of mouth and a real focus on exploring unconventional resources for job leads, INALJ grew from a subscription base of 20 friends to a website with over 500,000 visits in one month. Naomi believes that well-sourced quantity is quality in this narrow job market and INALJ reflects this with many new jobs published daily. She has also written for the 2011, 2012 and 2013 LexisNexis Government Info Pro and many other publications in the past decade. She presents whenever she can, including serving on three panels at the American Library Association's Annual Conference in Las Vegas; as breakout presenter at OCLC EMEA in Cape Town, South Africa; as a keynote speaker at the Virginia Library Association annual meeting; at the National Press Club in Washington DC; McGill University in Montreal, Canada; the University of the Emirates, Dubai, MLIS program and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Naomi was a Reference, Marketing and Acquisitions Librarian for a contractor at a federal library outside Washington, DC, and has been living and working in Budapest, Hungary and Western New York State. She spent years running her husband’s moving labor website, fixed and sold old houses and assisted her husband cooking delicious Pakistani food. She is preparing to re-enter the workforce and is job hunting. Her husband is now the co-editor of INALJ, a true support!  She has heard of spare time but hasn’t encountered it lately. She pronounces INALJ as eye-na-elle-jay. 

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