The Always Popular Interview Question: What’s Your Weakness?

Last weekend, I was a presenter at a student organization leadership conference attended by approximately 1,000 university students. I delivered two workshops that focused on how university students could utilize their leadership skills and leverage them to engage in effective career planning, including job hunting.

The workshops went well, and the students were engaged, especially when I got to talking about personal branding and career planning. For this post, I wanted to share a topic that came up that generated quite a bit of interest in one of the workshops.

I was talking about how it is never too early when career planning to become very familiar with commonly asked interview questions. But being familiar with these questions is just part of the equation. Another important part is to become very comfortable in being able to actually answer these questions well, knowing that to reach that comfort level takes practice and experience.

After collecting commonly asked interview questions from the students, one particular student asked the often-asked interview question:

What’s the best response to the interview question, “What are your greatest weakness?”

A lively discussion ensued, and though I had to switch gears and move on to other topics, I think that spending the time that we did on this question was worthwhile.

As we shared various strategies to consider when answering this question, my closing point on this topic was something like: “Yes, be knowledgeable about what’s typically considered good types of answers to the ‘weakness’ question. But at the same time, be sure to be genuine with your own response. That way, you can feel good about your answer and not have to worry about whether or not the interviewer liked your response.”

I was reminded about how much interest there typically is about this often dreaded interview question. Accordingly, several days after the workshops, there was a post about this question titled “The Dread Weakness Questions” on the “Get to Work” blog from the San Francisco Chronicle’s online website SFGate, which captured a lot of what we discussed in the workshop.

I laughed out loud at one of the comments from the SFGate post:

“My favorite response to ‘What is your biggest weakness?’

[Pause…] Ummmmm, I’d have to say chocolate.”