Editor’s note: This article was first published in February 2014. David Reese is described as vice president of human resources at Medallia, which was his role in 2014.
This is one of the most common questions in job interviews, and most people find it hard to answer with complete honesty: we don’t want to give the recruiter a reason not to hire us, but nor can we come across as arrogant by implying that we have no weak points.
The recruiter knows that we all have weak points. When candidates prepare for a job interview with an adviser, as a rule these advisers tell them (bad advice, as it happens) to try to make their flaws look like strengths, for example by using phrases like “I’m too much of a perfectionist”. (Steve Jobs was too much of a perfectionist, and it was not his weak point but one of his greatest qualities.) Or “I work too hard and it causes problems in my social life”. (Oh, please…)
For David Reese, vice president of human resources at Medallia, these days this kind of prepared answer is a big mistake: nobody believes them any more, except bad recruiters.
In his article for Harvard Business Review, he argues that answers like these “say little or nothing about the candidate and immediately suggest a huge lack of sincerity”.
According to Reese, these candidates show nothing of how they think beyond creatively avoiding being honest and self-critical. He believes that “having a room full of people like this is harmful to a company, because very few of them would later have the courage to stand up and honestly say what isn’t working in the company”.
(Read: The Murphy method: 6 mind games recruiters play)
“In job interviews I want to have a real conversation with real answers, so before we start I tell candidates to forget everything they have heard or read about how to get through a job interview successfully. I’m trying to find out whether they are self-aware, whether they can be self-critical and, most importantly, whether they are able to tell the truth when being honest is hard.
“I spend most of the interview trying to pry away the layers of canned, prepared answers, and when the interview is over I’m still asking myself: who is this person, really? And the worst part is that I’ll never know, because they’ll never get the job.”
So when you are asked about your greatest weakness, be honest about what you need to work on to improve. Better still, tell them you are already working on it. Giving that answer takes a lot of maturity, but it shows employers a sincerity that few people are able to offer. If an employer doesn’t hire you for being too honest, it is probably not a company you should be working for anyway.
Further reading
- The 5 real reasons you will get hired
- Techniques for telling when someone is lying to you
- 9 body language mistakes that could cost you the job
- 2 simple changes that will improve your CV
Featured image: Gren12345, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
