Q Statements: Your Secret WeaponIn the last chapter, you identified your skills, personal traits, com-
petencies, and gifts—a task that’s surprisingly difficult for most
job seekers. In fact, this crucial bit of “homework” puts you well
ahead of most other job applicants. It’s an essential step toward
your ultimate goal—being able to clearly describe your skills and
qualifications to an interviewer. The next step will be to use these
skills to create pithy, memorable, quantifiable “sound bytes”
about yourself, assertions we’ll call Q statements.
What Is a Q Statement?
A Q statementis a sentence (or group of sentences) that expresses
a numerical measurement of some action or accomplishment you
have performed. It is quantitative. A Q statement is not vague; it’s
exact. For example, rather than saying you “increased produc-
tivity,” using a Q statement, you would say that you “increased
productivity by 25 percent.”
Why quantify a skill? Let’s take a look at the following state-
ments and see which of them bears the most weight and leaves
the longest-lasting impression:
STATEMENTA: I am a good communicator.
STATEMENTB: I have lectured to more than 12,000 people world-
wide on the topic of personal financial planning,
and I have worked individually with clients from
19 to 90 years old.
Which of these two statements seems the most evocative? From
which one can you make a mental picture? Which will you
remember?
Statement B is more descriptive and more concrete. It does
not simply make a claim or advance a personal opinion. State-
ment B uses actual facts and numbers to specifically demonstrate
the skills. This kind of clarification gives the listener evidence of
the skill and a good idea of the scope of it.
Let’s take another example:
STATEMENTA: I’m an excellent manager.
STATEMENTB: I have managed 135 people on projects budgeted
for over $2.1 million.