What’s your weakness?

One of the questions that would be asked is interviews in what do you think you need improve? In this posting, I am going to write about how candidates respond to this questions and ideally how you should approach it?

While we are open and eager to our strengths, not many of us are comfortable to talk about what we need to improve for the reasons best known to us.

Once I was interviewing a MBA candidate and believe me everything went on well and I’ve almost decided to hire him.  However, when I asked him this question- what are your improvement areas? – he said he was perfect and there was nothing of that sort. I thought I should set the context for him to understand what is really expected out of this question. So I told him that everybody is work in progress. There are many things that I am working on. Even my CEO told us list of things that he wanted to improve.  I told him, so feel free to talk about what you need to improve.

To my surprise, he stuck to the same stand.

I’ve again told him, if you say you are perfect and you’ve got nothing to improve, I could only make one of these three conclusions or impressions.

1) You are overconfident so you think there is nothing for you to improve upon OR

2) You are not confident enough. You feel insecure and you are not willing to share or talk about it. OR

3) You are just ignorant.  Your self-awareness is less and you don’t know your blindspot/s.

Even then, he stuck to his stand and I had to take my stand which was rejection. 

I felt he was overconfident and not open to take a realistic call even after so much open discussion. Such candidates are not good team players and they would not be flexible and be open to feedback. They cannot be a good pick.

Let me share some of the interesting experiences that I’ve come across interviewing many graduate candidates (Fresher).  I really used to get different kinds of answers which I’ve given below. I would leave it to you to decide what you would feel about it.

# I eat a lot / I sleep a lot / I spend more time watching movies and I have to reduce it/ I fight with my siblings which I should avoid.

# I trust people and I see that sometimes, people take me for a ride.

# I am temperamental and I do yoga to control it. The funniest part was, this was told by almost all the students in one of the colleges where I went for campus hiring. I guess the college should have organized a mock interview with this example and almost all said this as a response to this question.

Every question has got a purpose behind it and the purpose of asking this question is to find out 

# if you are aware of your blind spots and have you taken / are you taking steps to work on it, and of course,

# How honest are you in accepting and talking about your improvement area.

#if you would bring in any shortcomings to the role that you would be entrusted with. 

So, let us take an honest shot to this question. Everyone is a human being which means, by default, all of us work in progress only.  An honest reply will be much more appreciated than flimsy artificial responses as given above.  Just by the virtue of having seen many candidates, any interviewer can make out what you are talking about.

So next time, when you are asked this question, be open to talk about it and substantiate it with what kind of steps or efforts you have been taking to work on it. That would be much appreciated.  

Remember, only a confident person can talk about his weakness.

So what is your weakness?

diD yOU enJOY ReADinG ThIS ArTIcLE? 

                                  If yES, 

yOU maY sHAre it wiTH Your FriENds tOO