"Why should I hire you?" is not a trick question. The interviewer is asking you to summarise the match between your background and their open role. Candidates blow it by either over-selling ("I'm a hard worker and a team player") or under-answering ("Because I need a job").
The 90-second template
- One sentence on the role as you understand it. Shows you've read the JD.
- Two sentences on the skills and experience that map to it, each anchored to a specific outcome.
- One sentence on the fit — the thing about the company, product, or team that drew you here.
- One sentence closing offer: what you'll do in the first 60–90 days.
A concrete example
"From the JD, this role owns the payments reliability track for a team scaling from 10M to 50M transactions a month. I've done exactly that progression twice — most recently at Acme, where I cut p95 checkout latency from 1.8s to 420ms by rewriting the idempotency layer. I've been following your engineering blog and the open-sourcing of your retry framework is what put Rozi-Roti on my radar. In the first 60 days I'd expect to shadow oncall, own one failure mode end-to-end, and come back with a proposal for where to invest next."
What to avoid
- •Listing adjectives ("I'm passionate, detail-oriented, a self-starter") — they're unfalsifiable.
- •Comparing yourself to other candidates — you don't know who they are.
- •Saying "because I really need this job" — truthful but irrelevant to the interviewer.