My husband is looking for a job (we relocated to our original country).
He is controller / finance director with 16 years experience, managing larger group of people, etc.
He has had difficulties in answering the interview questions “tell me about your weaknesses”, “what weaknesses would your last supervisormention?”.
I obviously know the “rule” to “play the game” about weaknesses, describe something you had a problem with but you overcame, you learned from it, turn the question into positive.
But we feel that recently this question is more in focus somehow? He got feedbacks not to bullshit, mention a true weakness.
Which is OK for a more junior person, they can say they don’t have relevant people management skills, or they still have to study in whatever field, but what can a guy at 40 with significant and broad experience both professionally and in peoples management answer here?
Thanks in advance for any feedback from those who are interviewing nowadays.
Your BSD swing long and far which tends to slap co workers in the face.
Your BSD tends to have a large gravitational pull which inadvertanly causes people who are passing by to bump into you.
Your BSD conducts electrictity better than silver which not only reflects sunlight that violently burns co-workers but also shorts out any computer you work on which prevents you from doing just about anything productive.
Your BSD has it’s own zipcode and you often don’t know where to have your employer to send correspondance to.
Your BSD is, in fact, it’s own BSD.
Trend? You’re so F&^&ing awesome that your own awesomeness prevents you from being even more awesome.
I’m sincerely sorry about my mistake, probably not the first and not the last. I acknowledge it is a major mistake and I feel very ashamed about it.
This should be the reason why I did not receive “expected” answers (focusing on the question).
Luckily it is my husband who faces this question at interviews not me. I could give a 4 hour speech about my weaknesses (and I did not even include this new one, the spelling).
Moosey, relax…I was attempting to be humorous. Now you’re making me feel bad.
For what it’s worth, I think that these types of questions are really dumb and I believe that it just serves to make the interviewer feel like they are peeling back some deep psychological layers on the candidate’s true motivations and nature. The reality is, these are pop psychology gimmicks and the interviewer is no psychologist – it is very hard to assess the quality of a candidate with any type of interview questions, even if there are multiple interviews.
As for the weaknesses question, it is hard to provide a “bullshit-free” answer to this type of question because it is in our nature to bullshit. Not with malicious intent, but what I’m saying is, I mean, what type of person who is ambitious and motivated and career-driven sits there and dwells on their weaknesses? If we continually gave into our fear and weaknesses we would be unable to act. This is why successful people find this such a hard question to answer.
For a married guy (possibly with kids?), a good answer might be something along the lines of “dealing with the work/family life balance,” being careful to spin it in such a way where he doesn’t seem like some kind of weak person who can’t balance both. It has to be clear that he is 100 percent charged by his work objectives, and rather than positioning it like it is an unwinnable tradeoff, he should spin it like, “I’m doing what I can given my limit of 24 hours in a day!” with a humorous element. It is critical that the weakness be expressed with humor, because successful people tend to use humor to take the edge off of stressful situations, and this should give the interviewer confidence that the weakness described is not a critical dent in your husband’s armor.
“as I get older I’m not as sharp as I used to be, and find myself delegating tasks which I could not do myself, this I consider to be a personal weakness. Of course it means I need to understand the skills and abilities of the people I give work too and therefore I assign more trust to them.”
it’s self-deprecating enough not to come across as BS, but equally easy to turn around into a positive trait.