"I'm an overachiever." "I really struggle with perfectionism." Have you ever said
either of these during a job interview? If so, chances are you were answering
"what is your greatest weakness?" and you weren't doing a very good job at
answering it. I'm Jen and I'll help you figure out how to answer the question
"what is your greatest weakness?" in the best way. If you're new here, my channel
is all about helping smart, career minded professionals stand out in today's job
market. At some point during any job interview, you're probably expecting to
get the question "what is your greatest weakness?" or some variation like "if you
could change one thing about yourself what would it be?" or "what would your last
manager say that your greatest weakness is?" I think this last one is especially
interesting because it forces you to think from another person's perspective.
It also speaks to why perfectionism and overachieving
aren't really weaknesses that you should mention during your job interview. Sure,
these things definitely can be weaknesses overall if you overdo them,
but you know that's not what people are looking for during a job interview. A lot
of people talk about these two types of things and other similar perceived
weaknesses that are really strengths during a job interview because somewhere
along the way, someone told them this is what they were supposed to do - that you
don't want to show your weakness. You want to only talk about your strengths.
In this case, a little bit of honesty can go a long way though. Managers have heard
perfectionism and overachiever or workaholic tons of times and nobody ever
believes it. Or if you're so extreme on it, then that is a negative and they
probably are a little bit concerned about you as a candidate. As a hiring
manager, I knew that when I asked people "what's your greatest weakness?" or "tell me
about your weaknesses" that most of them were going to tell me something positive
instead. And I wasn't really asking because I cared specifically about the
weakness. I was asking because I wanted to know 1) how honest they were going to
be, but more important, or equally as important at least, is the
second reason: I wanted to know how they perceived themselves. Were they a good
judge at what they were good at and what they were bad at? Because if they
couldn't tell me what they were bad at - and we're all bad at something - then why
should I fully trust what they say that they're good at? I liked being able to
get a little bit of response from people in this area.
I know on the candidate side, it's a really intimidating question. You don't
really want to say, "Hey, I'm bad at this", because it you think that what you're
saying is "don't hire me". Really, on the interviewers side, they want to know how
well do you know yourself and what are your areas that you perceive you need to
work on. What kind of answer is a good answer to give here that doesn't turn
the interviewer off because you answer with something that's really a strength
or doesn't go the other extreme and it's so bad that they are concerned about
that weakness as well? There's a fine line that you need to walk during your
interview between appearing confident - being confident - that you can do the job
and crossing over that line into seeming arrogant or like you know everything
that you could possibly know about the job and there's nothing you could ever
learn in the role, there's nothing anyone could teach you. That's always a concern
when hiring. You don't want someone that's not going to listen to anybody
around them because even if they know a lot about the job, there's always
something that you can learn from the people around you. Here's the type of
thing that I would expect to hear in a good answer to this question. In order to
answer this question in a really good way, you're going to want to tailor your
answer a little bit to each interview you go on. The weakness that you bring
up in one job interview may be very different than the weakness you bring up
in another job interview. Here's what you should be looking at. Firsts sit down with
a copy of the job description. Look through the skills that you need for
that. What are the ones that you know that you have to be really good at? If
you're a programmer and you need to be programming using Python, you don't want
to say, "My biggest weakness is my Python programming skills."
You want to pick something that's not central to the job
like that and the same with any other role. There are going to be things that
you know are critical to the role so definitely skip over talking about those
as a weakness. Instead, identify something else whether
it's something that's minor in the job role or not quite in the job at all.
Maybe if you're in a non-managerial position, one of your weaknesses that you
could talk about is, "I would like to improve my leadership skills." This is
something that isn't central to the job. It's a genuine weakness that you can
work on. It doesn't hurt your chances of getting the job.
It shows some awareness and it identifies something that you can work
on. After you've looked at the key skills for the job and thought about how that
relates to things you actually can improve on, you can go ahead and prepare
your answer. Here's something that could be really common for people. You
could say something like - "I have difficulty speaking in front of large
groups of people. A few months ago I joined Toastmasters to help me improve
my skills in this area." Notice I gave two parts to that answer. I talked about my
weakness, but then I went on to talk about how I'm trying to fix it. This is a
great way to answer this question because you're not just answering "what's
your greatest weakness?", you're answering "what's your greatest weakness and what
are you doing to improve on it?" which is really key. You've identified it as a
problem AND you're working towards the solution. Talking in front of people,
especially large groups, is definitely a weakness that a lot of people have. In
fact, some researchers say that people have a greater fear of public speaking
than death which seems a bit extreme to me, but it also seems safe to say that
there's a good chance that this might be your weakness or that it at least
triggers some ideas of what you can talk about when it comes to weaknesses.
Then ffollow up with what are you doing to fix it. If you're uncomfortable in groups
of people, it could be forcing yourself to talk in front of groups of people or
doing some communication training that helps you build these skills.
If your weakness is on a software that you know could be helpful, but you don't use
very much and isn't a central part of the job, it could be you're taking
training classes. None of this has to be stuff that costs money either. You can
work on skills and build skills for free and really you just want to tell the
interviewer, "Hey, I know this is a problem. I'm doing something about it." This is
exactly how you should answer questions when you're asked "what is your greatest
weakness?" I'm curious though what would you say your greatest weakness is. Are
you among the majority of the population that hates talking in front of groups of
people? Or maybe you love talking in front of groups of people, but you get
nervous one on one. Or maybe it's something else. What would you say the
weakness that you want to work on is or what are you doing to work on that
weakness? Let me know in the comments. If you're preparing for job interviews,
which I'm guessing you are because you're watching this video, I have a
whole collection of things that will help you get ready so check out the
other videos on the channel. I've also put together a cheat sheet that walks
you through the five key steps to landing your next job you can get your
free copy at the link in the description. Thank you so much for watching. I hope I
see you next time!