I think the worst moment of any job interview is when you hear, “So, what are your weaknesses?”
Most people I’ve talked to on the job-seeker side tend to agree. The problem is that people rarely tell the truth, or they manipulate it to a degree that it feels phony. Come on, who’s going to say, “I have zero patience for incompetents or posers”?
Many recruiters, on the other hand, disagree about the question’s worthlessness. In a recent edition of the Recruiter Roundtable on Yahoo! HotJobs, I was surprised to see most participants defend the practice of asking a candidate about his or her weaknesses.
“It’s not that I want to nitpick or make people feel uncomfortable, but rather I want to see in which areas they feel they need to improve and what they are doing about it,” says DeLynn Senna, a staffing executive with Robert Half International.
I’d like to strike that question from the interviewer lexicon, but it’s not going to happen. Read the article for more tips on coping with it, or using it to your advantage.
