The Volokh Conspiracy

As an employer, I do not use such an open-ended question. It really generates little useful information. If you want to probe an applicant, you might ask something more specific like "Tell me about a time when you had to give your boss bad news. How did you handle it?" or "Tell me about the most difficult experience you've had getting someone in your organization (not a subordinate) to co-operate with you. How did that turn out?" The specific question should be tailored to address one of the challenges you think the applicant will face in a new job or to address a potential problem revealed in aptitude testing or prior work history.

I never asked such questions when giving interviews.
There are many other questions like the one above. The problem is the answers do not reveal anything. If you get the "I work too hard" answer, it just tells you the candidate read an interviewing techniques book.

I found it better to get the candidates to tell stories, which comes out of the Behavioral Interviewing technique. The stories give the candidate some time to get over any nervousness and the response lets you ask follow up questions which can tell you about the character / values of the candidate. The character / values is what you are looking at in this portion of the interview, right?

Technical questions (can they do the job), and selling of your firm to the candidate (why they want to accept your offer), are separate sections in an interview.

I no longer ask this question of interviewees, but I used to, simply to guage their ability to respond to impossible questions. Do they become flushed and start stammering, or do they confidently weave a plausible line of bullshit? In that respect it's like the slippery-slope questions that law profs delight in throwing at hapless students. There may be many right answers; the key is to offer yours smoothly and with confidence.

In a case of cosmic justice, I myself had to answer just such a question in a recent interview for a state judicial post. I opted for the strength-as-weakness answer, which seemed to go over well.

I don't ask that one, but do ask impossible, open ended questions to see how people react. I hire technical people, and can usually get the measure of their skill set pretty quickly; what matters most beyond that is personality. My company is a quirky lot. When I have asked it, I usually got the stock answer, but twice got an honest response. I hired both of them. That isn't the whole reason I hired them, but it helped.

I agree with the tell-a-story technicque, too.

One of my favorites is to get people to relate how they handled failing at a task. Everyone has, and I usually open it by relating an example from my own experience, in order to break tension (I don't tell how I dealt with it, to avoid leading).

I'm in the software development industry and I do ask this question sometimes. I'm generally interviewing hard core server developers and find that the answers are often quite honest.

My primary reason for asking this question is as a check on how forthcoming and honest the candidate is being. It is one of the "book" questions and I become skeptical of candidates who provide "book" (usually "strength-as-weakness") answers. Everyone has true weaknesses and should understand at least the most troublesome of them - else it is very difficult to improve and/or work around the weakness.

When I sense that I'm getting an honest answer, this increases my confidence in the candidate's understanding of their own strengths and weaknesses. For example, if I'm looking for a "down and dirty" coding and debugging machine^H^H^H^HH^H^H^ developer, I'm more comfortable with individuals who understand their own strengths and weaknesses and that don't have a self image of being an uberarchitect.

If the candidate gets to the reference check stage, I do ask the references the question about the candidate and compare the candidate's self assessment to the assessment of the reference. I also sometimes discuss the candidates self assessment of "greatest weakness" with references - and sometimes discover that the weakness, while evident to others, is not as big a deal as the candidate thinks.

The answer also gives me a little heads up on how to best initially utilize and train the candidate if they are hired.

I've had some stellar developers working for me who had glaring weaknesses - it's the job of the management team to effectively utilize such people. (I always keep in mind that Einstein wasn't equally good at all things).

However, I’ve never made a (no)hire decision that was based heavily on the candidate’s answer to this question.

His interview going very well, having quickly become humorous, a friend of mine was asked this question. His quick response was "Duck Hunt. You know, that old game on Nintendo. I'm really bad at that." He was offered a summer associate position.

At least that's the story he told me.

My father used to use this question when conducting interviews. He says it's an invitation to hang yourself; many people with serious shortcomings will announce those shortcomings if you just ask them.

An alternate "good answer" I've heard suggested (apart from the old "positive weakness" trick) is to reply with a genuine but easily correctable weakness (e.g. "I've never worked with this specific tool your company uses").

Job interviews, it turns out, are a lot like the SATs. Now, I always did very well on standardized tests, so never took the Kaplan course. When I read about the Kaplan method later, I realized that all of his "pointers" were stuff that I had figured out intuitively.

I never had that intuitive feeling with interviews, though, and as it turned out I had a hell of a time getting a job, despite having universally high scores from elite educational institutions.

Then, a friend recommended "Guerilla Tactics for Getting the Legal Job of Your Dreams" (which applies equally well to law and non-law type jobs), and I realized that interviewing was essentially just like test taking. There were questions, and there were right and wrong answers, and the book told you what the right answers were.

After that, I soon went on five interviews and received two job offers from them -- much better than the one offer from 50 interviews I had before reading the book.

The book gave you the "positive as negative" answer to the "biggest fault" question. It also said that the question was to elicit how you answered stressful questions. Of course, by "gaming" the system, you are not actually stressed out so it doesn't really provide the information sought.

The only problem, it seems, came years later when I was the one conducting the interview (I never asked the "biggest fault" question), and realized that the answers I was receiving from one candidate were verbatim from the same book I had read!

Although I did not have full say in the hiring decision, he was the one who got the job.

For me, now, I have a preferred order of candidates in my mind before the interviews. The interview process is "Let me look at you to make sure you do not have bad breath, body odor, and are otherwise presentable."

I have, to date, made it down to the third person on my list based on the first two failing the "presentable" test. I have no illusions that I could get any more than that out of an interview.

Goober: I actually got the job when answering in a similar manner. (i.e., "Yes, I have stolen and gotten away with it.") According to the manager I ended up working for, the interviewer said I was "brutally honest"; in fact I felt that if their interview process reflected on their working environment, I didn't care whether they hired me or not.

I guess, in some sense, it was like dating. I passed the "Tao of Steve" test.

These questions are best for weeding out entry level prospects. It indicates how prepared they are for the interview but nothing else. The best answer I got was "chocolate malts". It was both humorous and plausible. In a similar vein I had a colleague who would place a piece of scrap paper on the floor prior to the interview and note which candidates stopped and picked it up versus those that walked right over it.

what is the purpose of asking job candidates to identify their greatest weakness?

Same as the purpose of lots of other standard silly interview questions: to let the interviewer avoid the work of trying to figure out if the applicant would be a good hire. Much easier to ask a superior sounding trendy question than to probe experience, skill level, and so on.

When I was working for the Government, we never asked that open-ended version. But we did ask about specific stressful encounters that were typical.

The one that I thought was most revelatory was asking candidates to describe how they would discipline or fire a problem subordinate (preferably with an example from their own experience): invariably the BSers gave elaborate answers about how they'd never had to do this (or never would have to), because they were such great managers of people.

This was--needless to say--not a positive in my book: anyone who's been in a management or supervisory position for more than a very short period has had to deal with a problem employee, and if you haven't at least thought about it enough to give a plausible answer, you're unfit to be in such a job.

Doesn't every reasonable person have a professional weakness (or "development need") that he's working on? Like a fear of public speaking or a tendency to procrastinate? Seems to me like the best answer is to state the problem honestly and then talk about steps you're taking to fix it (like a public speaking class or sharper to-do list).

With A.Nym, I've also found the impossible, open-ended question to be the most useful. My best hire was the one who answered "I don't know". He ended up spending four months working on it, and produced an excellent result.

I like using this question for interviews of internal applicants because I generally already have my own opinion, or at least a vague sense, as to what the answer is. If the candidate gives the same answer I'm thinking of, I know that they are honest, self-aware, and likely attempting to rectify/overcome the weakness. If they give one of the strength-as-weakness answers despite possessing more substantial weaknesses that I am aware of, then I know they aren't as prepared to work on the things that are most challenging for them.

I'm new to the labor force, so I've never conducted an interview, but I have been asked that question in a few. At the position I was hired for, I answered honestly: That I have a touch of OCD and will get involved in the most minute details of a project that nobody else cares about, sucking up a lot of time in the process. My (now) boss and I ended up talking about that a little, and I related a story about once working 67 hours straight on a project at the OC when I was in school just to make sure all of the pages had exactly the same template and things were exactly as I wanted them.

It's sort of the old strength-as-weakness trick, but it really is something I have to be careful of lest I spend hours trying to align the pixels on some reports that only five people see and only I care about the aesthetics of.

I think I read this one somewhere: "I work so fast sometimes my clothes catch on fire."

I've had success with, "Sometimes I cramp up during the transition from the bike to the run."

It tells them two things:
1) I do triathlons. Would you like to hear more about that? Most of my interviewers have ended up asking me about Ironman and triathlon anyway. I think they'd rather talk about that than have their 90th conversation about moot court or law review. Distinguishing yourself is key.
2) My biggest weakness can be remedied by a banana.

another interviewing cliche: "where would you like be in five (ten) years?" i'd like to see comments from both sides on this tired old tactic.

Another approach is to say something like:

"chocolate truffles"
"fast cars"
"wine, women and song"

At some point in the interview, you have to make a personal connection with the interviewer so that he remembers you favorably. This is a really tense adversarial question, and if you can break the tension with a little humor, well ...

josil - "where would you like be in five (ten) years?" When I was interviewing in my senior year of college (..cough.. years ago) I always thought that was a useless question. What kid that age honestly knows what he wants that far ahead? And now, at least in my business, things change so fast that any such long range plans are speculative at best. I said as much to one interviewer, and he said the "book" response was "management", which I found strange in my field (engineering).

In Japan, companies are using blood type to screen candidates. Handwriting analysis and horoscopes have been the fad at different times. How is the greatest weakness question any less lame? Does the job REQUIRE some particular weakness? No? So...?

Are you such an insightful and keen observer of people that you can meaningfully assess people with this stupid question? Bullshit. You are hiring to your prejudice and selecting for people who look like you.

I mention my bad back and that I have a hard time sitting still for a long time.

office politics - specifically an intolerance for office politics