The dreaded interview question (what is your greatest weakness?)

One of the toughest interview questions for a lot of people is the dreaded, “What is your greatest weakness?” “Great,” we say to ourselves, “let me just take the next few minutes to completely tell you how awful I am and why you shouldn’t hire me!” That can really be how that question sounds, and how we perceive it. But in reality, it shouldn’t be as hard as we try to make it.

You have probably heard tons of advice about this question, but I feel compelled to add mine, and since this is a blog, I get to. One of the more common pieces of advice goes something like, “OK, instead of really giving a weakness, tell them something that you instead turn into a strength!” Yeah, like I’ve never heard that one before. Did anyone see the first season of The Apprentice? When it got to the final three candidates, one of them tried that approach, and he was called out on it. The interviewer wants to hear a legitimate weakness; anything else can be perceived as being dishonest, and isn’t very credible.
And avoid cliché answers. Perfectionist? Wow, that makes you just like the other 20 candidates we’ve been interviewing.
Instead of these approaches, consider a few things: consider making it experience or skill-based and use the “sandwich method”.
If you’re a procrastinator (which I’ve heard many times), there’s not much I as an employer can do to fix that. I could try to set regular deadlines and check in often, but that’s more work for me and I have no guarantee that something like that will even work. I really have no control over personality traits that might be weaknesses. Instead, consider going with experience or skills. If you don’t know Excel as well as we would like, I can send you to a workshop on it, or have a trainer teach you. Those are things I can help fix.
But instead of relying on me to fix those, tell me what you’re doing to overcome your weaknesses on your own. That’s where the “sandwich method” comes in. Tell me a real, honest answer, but tell me how you’re already trying to fix it. Going back to the Excel example, tell me that you’re enrolled in a winter-break class on Excel organized by your university’s IT department or that even though you aren’t proficient, you did organize a database on your own to track client orders for a bookstore.
A sample answer might be, “I know how important it is to use Excel in this position, but I’m not as proficient as I would like to be. In my internship at XYZ, I did use Excel to create a database to track our customer contacts, but I would still like to know more, so I enrolled in an IT course offered by our university, and will be taking that over the winter break to learn how to create advanced spreadsheets.”
Of course, you have to tailor it to yourself, but consider those as tips to address your weakness.