How To Answer The 'Greatest Weakness' Question

How To Answer The 'Greatest Weakness' Question

The interview question “What’s your greatest weakness?” is one of most pointless and offensive questions you can ask a job applicant, but interviewers still ask it every day.

They don’t realize that well-brought-up people do not ask perfect strangers about their weaknesses.

They don’t realize that asking the question “What’s your greatest weakness?” marks them as just another clueless, by-the-book HR or Recruiting drone. We have to feel sorry for them!



The obnoxious question “What’s your greatest weakness?” should have been retired from the corporate and institutional recruiting playbook at least twenty years ago.

Here are five reasons this is one of the worst interview questions ever asked of a job-seeker:

You are an interviewer, not a therapist. It is none of your business what someone’s weaknesses are.
It is cowardly to ask a personal question about someone’s weaknesses without sharing your own weakness at the same time. Doing so conveys the message “I will happily ask you questions I wouldn’t answer myself. I’m in the power position. You aren’t!”
It is only a cultural construct that people have weaknesses at all. Some people subscribe to that view. It is a popular view in the United States but many people living elsewhere believe that people are perfectly equipped for their missions here on earth.
If a weakness is something you wish you could do better than you can, then there will always be millions more things that you can’t do than things you can do. What makes some of these things weaknesses? If you’re interested in them, you’ll get better at them over time and if you’re not, you won’t.


“What’s your greatest weakness?” is a miserable interview question if only because it is so trite. An interviewer who relies on lame, done-to-death interview questions tells the world he or she doesn’t have the insight or creativity to improve on the Mad Men-era traditional interview script — and that is sad!
If you are asked the “weakness” question on a job interview, you have two choices. You can get up and leave the interview — and there are certainly situations where that may be the best course of action — but if you want to stick around, you have to answer the question.

Most of us have heard that the best answer to “What’s your greatest weakness?” is to share a “weakness” that is really a strength, like a tendency to work too hard or be too demanding of yourself.

Those lame, done-to-death answers are just as bad as the original lame, done-to-death question!

Here is another way to answer the question “What’s your greatest weakness?”



Interviewer: So Andy, what would you say is your greatest weakness?

Andy: I used to stress about a number of things that I thought I should be better at than I was. In my first job out of college, I worried that I should be better at creating spreadsheets. I took classes in Excel and I learned a lot, but over time I realized that I didn’t really care about spreadsheets.

I moved closer and closer to creative work with every job I took after that. My initial concern that I wasn’t good enough at spreadsheets was really just my fear of stepping into my power.

Nowadays I don’t think of myself as a person with weaknesses. There are lots of things I’m never going to be good at, and that’s okay. It would be a bad use of my time to try to get better at those things. My job is to get better at the things I love to do — things I’m already good at, like art direction and design.

End of Script

Andy shifted the frame when he answered the “weakness” question in a non-traditional way. He made the interviewer think, and that is the best thing you can do on a job interview.

If the interviewer is not actively thinking, you can be sure that he or she is miles away in their mind, thinking about other things. In that case, they will forget you two minutes after the interview is concluded.



Andy took the conversation to a higher level when he questioned the notion of weaknesses rather than saying ”My weakness is that I’m too conscientious about my work!” like one more submissive job seeker in the endless stream of them.

Will Andy’s interviewer like his answer to the “weakness” question?

Andy doesn’t really care whether the interviewer loves him or hates him.

He only wants to work with people who like his brand of jazz. He spends way too many hours at work to be willing to work with people who don’t get him and thus don’t deserve him.

You spend a lot of hours at work, too — don’t you deserve to work alongside people who get you?