In a perfect world, job interviewers would be able to gauge your talents with great accuracy, so that you wouldn’t need to engage in any form of boasting or self-promotion. But talents can be notoriously hard to judge, particularly in short-term interactions with other such as job interviews: there is only a 4% overlap between interview ratings and subsequent job performance ratings.
How to Highlight Your Talents in a Job Interview Without Showing Off
In a perfect world, job interviewers would be able to gauge your talents with great accuracy, so that you wouldn’t need to engage in any form of boasting or self-promotion. But research suggests that’s far from the case. So what should you do if you are interested in communicating your talents to others without coming across as a show-off? Speak about your passion rather than your skills. Don’t make generic self-promotional statements – e.g., “I’m a fast learner”, “I’m super driven”, or “I have great people-skills” — but demonstrate these things with concrete examples. If you have good people skills, you will avoid interrupting the interviewers, or speaking for too long. And if you want others to believe that you have good learning ability, then talk about concrete difficult problems you have solved or niche expertise you have acquired.