How to be stronger when answering about your weaknesses

How to be stronger when answering about your Weaknesses

The age old interview question of “what is your weakness” or “what do you see as being your weaknesses”. This question has most likely been posed in all, if not most, interviews that you have been too. Yet, why do most people struggle to answer it and feel good about their response?

Majority of candidates that I work with struggle with this question, as they see it as a negative question. The first step is take away the negative feeling around the term “weakness”. The reason for the question is to establish whether you are aware of your personal / Professional development and what you need to do to be stronger in that area.

This is not a negative question, it is a query based on your own progression, success, and future achievements so your mental attitude toward the questions should be around building yourself up not destroying your confidence or abilities.

Second to this the term, “weakness” is a feeling and is not quantifiable. Your idea of weakness and mine, are completely different, exactly the same with other feelings such as happiness, sadness and pain - none of which are quantifiable and our interpretations vary largely.

Where most people usually fall down is when they answer the question with their interpretation of weakness in a particular area. However, how do we know that your experience in a subject that you see as a weakness is not a strength in the eyes of the interviewer?

We don’t.

So, to get around this I would say firstly, re-phrase the question either verbally or in your head to help digest your next response.

I would change the question to something like “what areas do I want to improve in?”, “what could I change to make me better than I am?” or “what areas if I knew more in, would add value to me?”- These examples are not exhaustive so pick your style of question.

Once we have re-phrased the question I would then look at the following equation to help with our response.

Subject + Experience + Action = Weakness answer (areas I want to improve in)

I will briefly cover each part of the above.

Subject

What is the area that you want improve on to achieve your goals? It could be a personality trait such as organization, it could be a particular subject such as cold calling or even a more specific such a particular technology or qualification.

Experience

Once you have picked your subject we now need to cover what you have done on that subject already, labelling any key achievements. Alternatively, if you have had experience in the subject you need to draw from previously relatable experience and link it to the subject matter.

For example, my subject is windows server 2012 and my experience is windows server 2008, we will talk about what we have done on the predecessor and links to why it is still relevant to newer update.

Action

Now that we have highlighted the subject and our experience to date on the area, we need to explain what we have planned or what we want to achieve in the subject so as to make your experience stronger.

Whereas with experience if they asked a question it will be relatively easy to answer because we are talking about what we have already achieved so will be memorable.

With the action element we need to have done our research so as when we are asked WHO, WHAT, WHY, WHEN, and HOW, we are able to answer showing that we have taken our personal development seriously. IT could be as simple as knowing what courses’ you need to complete to get the certification that you want, how much it costs to complete the course, how long it usually takes to pass the course and what it will give you in added value.

Summary

To summarize I would re-phrase the question and then tackle the question with subject, experience and action.

By doing this you are not being assumptive that you and the interviewer’s interpretation on weakness is the same, as it allows them to have enough information to make their mind up on whether it is in fact a weakness or a positive in disguise.

Second to this, it shows to the potential employer that you are able to complete a self-assessment on areas that you want to improve on as to achieve your goals, and the ability to create actions so you can get there.

At least this way your new employer already knows how they can help you achieve your goals moving forward!