During a job interview, employers are likely to ask direct, open-ended questions. Open-ended questions are usually used to better understand your personality, work style, and qualifications, and to determine if you are a good fit for the role, team, and culture.
“What motivates you?” is a common open-ended question that you should be prepared to answer.
What motivates you?
Since you will likely have many professional and personal triggers, take some time to think about the ones that are most relevant to the job you are interviewing for.
In this article, we'll outline several ideas to consider to help you prepare your response, as well as examples of answers you can make yourself.
Some other formulas
There are many formulas related to the question "What motivates you?" You can learn the answer to all the question formulas from this article, and from the questions:
- What is your motive?
- What motivates you to work more?
- What are you listening to?
- What motivates you at work?
Why does the interviewer ask you this question?
The skills and experience are great, you'll need them to impress this recruiter, the hiring manager, and everyone you meet when interviewing for a new job.
But it is not enough. You must also be motivated to use these skills to use and benefit so that your potential employer will actually benefit from them.
They are not just looking for other arbitrary information about you. They are also trying to see if you will care about what you are going to do and bear the full weight of your abilities to take on that specific role in this particular company.
In other words, they want to know if you'll be a committed, happy, productive worker who inspires you to do your best in that environment.
Asking “What motivates you?” helps recruiters learn more about you as a person. Your answer can give them insight into:
- What moves you?
- What you enjoy and what you value.
- Whether you will do well in the job role.
- How do you fit into their team?
How to prepare for the answer
A good answer to the question What motivates you? is brief and makes use of detail. Whatever you say about your motives, you need to support it with examples from your studies and experiences at work or extracurricular activities, and it should relate to the skills and abilities required for the job you are seeking.
What motivates you? It may seem like a scary existential question, but answering it in an interview is actually quite simple if you follow these steps:
- What do you enjoy doing? Think about your course and your broader interests. What do they have in common?
- What did you enjoy while working part-time jobs or an internship? What have you been looking forward to? When you came home feeling like you had a good day, what kind of tasks or projects did you deal with?
- What kind of tasks are you better at? In what kind of environments (busy, driven by deadlines, loud, quiet, etc.) do you perform best?
Case in point: Maybe you were an athlete in high school and college, and that's what you're passionate about. This is a great explanation of why you are interviewing for any athletics job and what motivates you every day.
This could be for a job as a personal trainer, coach, physical therapist, scout, or any other sport-related job.
Examples of answering the question
Examples can help you understand how to carefully answer the question “What motivates you?” Consider these sample answers to help inspire you to prepare your own answer:
I'm excited about meeting the goals set by the deadlines, it gives me a sense of accomplishment and it's something I can go back to and say 'I made it'. I am also driven by visual results - for example, when I wrote an article for my student newspaper, I felt fulfilled knowing that up to 16,000 students would read it.
I like to challenge myself and progress on a personal level. This is what drew me to the sales department at first. It's personally challenging, forcing me to develop new skills that I wouldn't have attempted on my own - like cold calling someone or starting a conversation with a complete stranger. It changed my confidence level and my whole life, not just my career, and it still motivates me and leads me through tough days, or days when things just don't go my way.
I had seen many family members struggle with addiction, so after graduating with my degree in psychology, I knew I wanted to work in addiction research and treatment. The impact this research can have is huge, and that's what gets me excited. Also, the field is always evolving and provides new challenges to keep me in my professional development. I love working, and that's what I want to continue doing throughout my career.
I have always loved math and computers. I don't have a personal reason, it's just what I'm excited to do. I can't imagine doing anything else for my career.
I'm really driven by the results. I like it when I have a concrete goal to meet and enough time to figure out a solid strategy to achieve it. In my last job, our annual goals were pretty strong, but I worked with my manager and the rest of my team to create a monthly strategy to meet the year-end numbers. It was really exciting to achieve this.