Perfecting Your 60 Second Pitch

On July 10, 2025, Steve Dalton followed-up his previous session with a overview of how we can all perfect our 60 second “elevator” pitch. This event was the first in our third seminar series theme, Skilled and Ready to Serve: Marketing Your Development Experience Effectively, and Laura Sheehan, Georgetown SFS, moderated the discussion.

During this session, Dalton shared his perspectives on how to best answer the dreaded request many of us face as we apply and interview for new positions: Tell me about yourself. While deceptively simple, it can be a daunting question to answer – and our ability to provide a coherent and effective response plays a decisive role in the hiring process.

As is immediately apparent from the table above, while our very first impressions (e.g., introductions and small talk) may not make our break an interview, our comfort offering a thoughtful elevator pitch in the first 5 minutes is critically important.

Although many of us may believe that the tougher questions concerning our ability to handle challenging work environments or ethically ambiguous situations are where our respective candidacies may shine or falter, prospective employers place heavy emphasis on how we talk about ourselves and past professional experiences.

In fact, over a third of job interviewers admitted that they had decided whether a candidate was right for the job by how they responded to this request.

So, how can we best respond? What are some of the best tools and tricks we have at our disposal to craft effective stories about our past experiences?

To help us create our best 60 second pitch, Dalton offered his FIT method. As part of this method, he recommended everyone discuss what their “Favorite” part of their previous career or job was, offer the “Insight” they learned in this role, and explain their “Transition” to whatever new field of interest inspired them.

For example, we can talk about how “helping those in need” would be our “favorite” aspect of our careers, relent that we “learned a lot about the importance of financing key initiatives” as part of our job, and then underscore why that experience animates our “interest to transition into a financial sector career” in the future.

Throughout his remarks, Dalton referenced his background in chemical engineering as not only an example of a good “transition” (from the sciences to career advising), but also to stress his interest in applying matter-of-fact logic and repeatable models to the job search. Undoubtedly, the FIT model “fits” this description perfectly!

For Dalton, using this method not only forces us to focus on the important – and less risky – facets of our previous work (i.e., the “why’s” not the “what’s”), but it also imposes a narrative structure on our response. By offering an explanation that draws causal relationships between different experiences and skills, we are able to both highlight our adaptability and initiative, without admitting to the more negative aspects of previous jobs.

In other words, why we are making the change and in what direction we wish to go are far more important than the simple fact of the change itself. Employers will already know that we are transitioning between various roles and sectors. Instead, they will want to know why we are doing so.

Of course, this method takes practice to perfect – and some of the AI tools we discussed in our last session with Jeremy Schifeling may be helpful for practicing your responses! Yet with repetition and an increasingly nuanced and honest answer, we can ace this question and let employers learn more about our careers and previous work.

First impressions may not be everything, but how we talk about ourselves is paramount!

Other Previous Sessions

Please feel free to browse our other previous sessions to access summaries, video content, and more information about our other events!