How to Tackle Three of the Toughest Interview Questions
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At this point, hand the interviewer a card you had pre-prepared, which reads "My over-preparation sometimes comes across as arrogance".
Then again the last time I heard that question I didn't get offered a job. So maybe there's something to hearing it.
Think of it as sort of a game. You may think (as I do) that the game is basically bullshit, but something is in fact being measured by the question, even if it's only how well you play this particular game. And, to be fair, I imagine that if you're good at this game, you'll be good at other useful games (bullshitting, negotiating, etc...)
"I don't know any COBOL and I've never done anything in ADA. My C isn't as strong as I'd like it to be, but -as I mention on my resumé- I'm working in some open source projects bug fixing to get it stronger."
"Since you asked me about my weaknesses, it seems only fair to ask: What's the worst thing about working here?"
I've never not been offered a job after an interview with that line in it, though I think it's only come up twice.
But this answer is unlikely to be the worst thing about you. You probably do have character flaws which affect your work. It's just that digging into them won't do anything except give the advantage to someone else who kept his mouth shut.
I submit that what this question really does is test fit to a certain corporate culture. There's a tacit understanding that you are supposed to come up with some token flaw to use. People oblivious of this will either overshare or obviously deflect the question, and people who are stubbornly honest will also not give the expected answer.
This kind of obliviousness or stubborn honesty can be a political liability. E.g.: if you are asked about your boss's or team's or company's worst weakness, you should also offer some bullshit token flaw which isn't really meaningful, because this determines their futures too.
If a culture isn't specifically built to put honesty ahead of politics, politics will quickly take the lead and honesty will be a casualty.
The work history serves as a nice interview warmup and is a good gauge of a candidate's ability to communicate. A bad answer is to mumble out what's on paper in front of you. A good answer will reframe the question in terms of what the job ad described.
The weakness question tells me how introspective you are. Someone aiming at self mastery that has a big picture view is going to give a vastly different answer than someone fresh out of school that's read an advice column and thinks they're a rock star.
"What's your greatest weakness" is an awful question. As a candidate, you never really know what the interviewer's angle with that question is. Almost no candidate will answer it with complete honesty, just like a wife asking her husband "does this make me look fat?", and for the same reason--any answer you'll give will be used against you, with only a vague, remote chance that it'll help you at all. It's also lazy and arrogant on the part of the interviewer, since it implies that instead of actually probing the candidate's expertise and skill and history for weaknesses, they're going to sit back and let you volunteer something and save them the effort. There are less adversarial ways to probe for a candidate's point of view on their own development.
There are exceptions for these rules. For instance, if you're hiring salesmen or spin doctors, you can ask just about any question and see if they try and turn it into a sales pitch for themselves. Likewise, if you're hiring someone into a position that involves negotiation, watching how they game their way through the "what's your greatest weakness" question could be instructive. For my part, I'm glad my field has actual technical substance that I can be interviewed about.
Finally, there are a lot of unspoken cultural assumptions with these kinds of questions as well, especially with regards to selling yourself. Americans sell themselves--other cultures don't necessarily. This might be another difference between engineers and the rest of the workforce. Engineers are far more scarce, and you're forced to pull from a global candidate pool, or at least from a local candidate pool that's already pulled in lots of immigrants. In other fields, it doesn't actually hurt you to have more implicit biases in favor of American candidates because there are plenty of American candidates.
Around here, we hire technical people based on substance, not salesmanship. What the fuck do you do?
It's part of an interview process that includes an in depth review of your projects and roles, a technical screen, some design questions, et al.
"Wtf do I do"? I don't hire people that become belligerent over or flustered over simple meta level questions.
You might reconsider your negative bias towards "spin", btw... http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/10/the-one-thing-every...
> It's part of an interview process that includes an in depth review of your projects and roles, a technical screen, some design questions, et al.
It sounds like we agree there. The background question is essential. Behavioral questions are essential.
My problem is with the idea of agonizing over how you're going to spin your answers to these questions. It should just be a pretty straightforward conversation, and a fair share of the onus is on the interviewer for turning it into a conversation. If you're not willing to do that, that tells me that you, as a potential coworker or manager, are lazy and arrogant when dealing with colleagues or subordinates. Did you forget that the candidate is interviewing the company as well?
"What's your greatest weakness" is a lazy and arrogant question. It's also adversarial and belligerent. To the interviewer, the question is a zero at best because you'll never get a brutally honest answer to it. To the candidate, the question is a red flag. Asking the question is never a win, and neither is answering it.
Finally, while I've mostly accepted in my own life that a little bit of salesmanship and negotiation is needed to get by in the world, I simply don't think it's a good hiring criteria for engineers. Ten times out of ten, I want a colleague who is brilliant technically and a little naive rather than a colleague who is merely competent but a great bullshitter. I think it's much more important to select for "not an asshole" and "enough of a grownup to behave professionally" than salesmanship. Crucially, this is something I try to evaluate on both sides of the interviewing table, and I will think you're a bit of an asshole if you ask what my greatest weakness is.
I much prefer to ask what they have done in the last year to improve as a developer, and what they feel they need to do in the next year.
But as an interviewer, you always have to be wondering how honest a person is being. That's why you also do an in-depth examination of their past projects, and ask them to design something.
Of course, but you don't want to exacerbate the problem by making it socially difficult for them to think honestly and clearly.
After an initial screening (minimal technical competence, etc.), and a review of work samples already prepared, I think a walkthrough of "what have you done, and why", starting as early as possible, makes sense. It's not just passive "I worked at X, Y, Z", but trying to actually understand the candidate and his motivations. It's interesting to explore what someone didn't do as much as what they did do. The point of being comprehensive is that it's much more difficult to come up with a bonus story with that level of detail while keeping it consistent, and the most interesting stuff is not the overt things ("I worked on guidance systems") but all the details and motivations.
This could easily take 2-3h even for a 30 year old. Doing it without 1) being a dick 2) psychologically taxing 3) being confrontational is the hard part. I'd personally rather have a 2-3h interview/talk with a manager or founder, and a half-day of technical stuff, than sit through 8 interviews with people I won't be working with doing a combination of technical and non-technical.
Then, work-product sample, as close to the actual work as possible.
This is like the ancient Chinese exams which assessed applicants' suitability by their knowledge of classical poetry. Of course people who are very well prepared or smart will do better in aggregate and with certain biases, but this doesn't mean you are measuring what you claim to measure.
I have an objection to The hiring manager doesn't need you to walk him through your resume chronologically—he can read what's on the page, after all.
Most interviewers I've met actually have not read the cv further than the absolute minimum to match keywords, and are not interested in reading the printed cv, that appears to be a write-only piece of paper... they take notes on it.
The interviewers who did read the CV beforehand are also the ones that direct the conversation themselves and always ask in chronological order anyway.
It seems that they do that because they're seeking to make up a narrative, a logical evolution of the career, so Ramit's advice stands after all.
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I think in at least some cases it serves two purposes:
1. Does your recollection actually match up with what they have in front of them? Going through agencies you'll have your resume altered without your knowledge.
2. Can you present written information in a compelling (or at least accurate) way verbally?
The sad truth though is that many others don't have the time or don't give a f#~%. It shows through many details. I don't know why. Maybe it's because they already have a candidate that they think fits the best, and are only trying to present the customer worse options to make the one shine. Or maybe they're underpaid, go figure.
There is a certain rules I've inferred from many interviews: if I reach the technical interview, I'm in.
If the HR person is the motivated, organized kind, I will reach the technical interview (so I'm in) unless I ask for 5k€ more than what the inteded to pay, 3k€ more is OK.
If the HR person is lazy or clueless, I could just walk away. I don't just in case, but I've never seen nothing good coming from this kind of people.
About agencies changing cv, I'm afraid it's not the case. I have the cv uploaded in the jobs site so they could just download it when they receive the application (I know because I've been at the other side of the table and used the same site). They don't. The first thing they ask when they contact me is to send them the very same cv by email.
I think perhaps the author is suggesting that you don't just regurgitate exactly what is written on your résumé, but rather embellish and highlight the relevant experience from each job that makes you a great candidate.
I think it would be ok to go a little more chronological and not so much of a sales pitch like the author wrote.
Most of us write code; it's a technical occupation, and none of us are great at everything. Are you super amazing and proficient with 100% of the technologies you'll ever need to interact with? Can you not talk competently about how you have been trying to get better at something? Are you not capable of admitting a weakness without crippling insecurity?
Since you know this will be asked, are you so disorganized that you can't think in advance to come up with an honest answer?
The only way to answer "too honestly" is to admit incompetence with the basic skills I'm hiring for, or reveal massive personality problems. You score an "A" if you talk about how you're trying to improve.
More commonly, applicants reveal themselves as someone willing to lie to my face with a bullshit answer. I've never hired someone like that and never will.
Edit: Also would never hire someone who was offended by this question. I think another commenter's suggestion that the applicant ask what the worst thing about working at a company is fair, and vital information. Of course, when I've asked this as an applicant I never received anything but bullshit in response.
For example, most of my career involves unix systems internals, databases and networking. Stuff generally involving valuable state. I've done hardly any professional graphics or gui work. So when I get this question, I generally just point that out. Ephemeral stuff like video games isn't my line of work, and I'm not very experienced at UI stuff.
Nobody who's ever care enough to interview me has been unhappy with that answer.
People have been asking this for so long that it really only gauges whether the applicant canned an answer to it which sounds bad enough that you won't think it's bullshit, but good enough that they aren't hurting their application. As with other interrogation techniques you often aren't selecting against lying, but just for plausible lying that you are unequipped to detect. It is certainly an illusion that you are selecting for honesty this way.
If you do want to hire honest people, and it isn't for an area like sales where it is important for them to project unrealistic levels of self-confidence, you will cause less needless anxiety and get more actionable information if you can get specific on what sort of disclosure you need, rather than just asking the applicant to incriminate themselves in the worst way they can imagine.
If you want to punish people with ability and integrity but lower self-esteem then this question is your ideal instrument.
The "worst" part of the question is the worst part. I talk to people about "one" weakness. I also ask for how they are trying to improve, which is actually the key part of the question to me.
This is not intended as a pressure question. The point is not to learn about a weakness so I can disqualify an applicant. If people ask this question in the hopes that an applicant will incriminate himself, they're doing it (interviewing) wrong. I think this misperception about the intent of the question is what drives a lot of the fuss about it.
I think an interview process that is focused on filtering only people who aren't bad enough to obviously reject is going to net a company a lot of bad hires. You're right, plausible lying can be difficult to distinguish from truth. But the kind of hire I'd like to make is one who can speak fluently and with clear honesty about an area where he/she would like to improve.
To your last point: really don't think this is fair. If an applicant isn't comfortable with discussing a single weakness without feeling totally compromised, then I'm truly sorry, but their poor self-esteem is likely to get in the way of co-workers being honest with them. I say that as someone not characterized with excessively high self-esteem.
You also said people who don't answer the question directly are lazy and dishonest. Now I must ask, do you list a glaring disinterest in the perspectives of others among your own weaknesses? If not, does that make you lazy and dishonest?
This this really bugs me. You needn't ask at all; it was your choice to make an ad hominem attack.
We merely disagree about the utility of an interview question; I think it's revealing and you don't. You're offended because I've said that I think failing to answer this question well may be indicative of personal flaws. That's the position of anyone who uses this question, not an attack on any poster here, most of whom disagree with me.
If you want to sit in an echo chamber, go somewhere else.
Edit: Not sure why I've been downvoted. Feel like this was a pretty moderate response to someone who directly and personally insulted me.
Again, what you did (asking a question when the answers were right in front of you) indicated that you neither knew or cared enough to actually read what others were saying. I promise you, this is not a good look. Disagreeing with the answers is one thing. But behaving as though they don't even exist is another. And given what we're discussing, this obliviousness is entirely relevant to the conversation in that it demonstrates that people aren't necessarily aware of their own shortcomings, at least not to the point where they can enumerate them crisply, completely, and professionally. Even a modicum of self-awareness (which you seem to lack) should make this clear.
And no, this observation doesn't constitute an ad hominem attack. Were the personal factor irrelevant (e.g. "How could we trust you with the company's finances? You're a woman!") then it would be. But that's because it introduces a logical fallacy (thinking women, by their nature, can't handle finance), not because it's disparaging. There's no rule of debate that says people can't say things that are true simply because it could cause others to take offense. As long as things they're saying are accurate and relevant, they're fair. That's why saying "We can't trust you with the company's finances. You're a convicted embezzler!" is not an ad hominem attack, even though a person's character is clearly the subject. Given the circumstance, character is entirely relevant. Indeed, it would be illogical NOT to mention it.
Now, it should be clear that there is nothing irrelevant about an overlooked weakness that exists in a speaker who is busy arguing that people who are unprepared to discuss their weaknesses are either lazy or dishonest. Obviously, you'd be unprepared to discuss your own weakness if you needed to, and not because you're lazy or dishonest. It's because you're human, just like the rest of us.
The problem with humans is that a lot of them are stupid. They ask stupid questions and draw stupid conclusions from the answers they receive. Smart people learn to identify the stupid ones fairly swiftly, and after having been burned by stupidity, they learn to evade it when necessary.
Few questions telegraph stupidity more reliably that "Tell me about your weakness?" You may think it's a great question, but as we've seen, you rank fairly low on the self-awareness scale and your idiotic judgements about people who are uncomfortable with it ("Lazy unprepared liar!") just confirms smart people's deepest fears about what goes on inside the heads of people who think this question is a great way to get reliable information.
I like how you ignore where I respond to a prior comment, describe the commenter's arguments as fair, and then address them one by one. Maybe you notice where I don't insult the guy who disagrees with me? You've now written 500+ words of arrogant moralizing premised on a single rhetorical question which you intentionally misconstrued.
> Now, it should be clear that there is nothing irrelevant about an overlooked weakness that exists in a speaker who is busy arguing that people who are unprepared to discuss their weaknesses are either lazy or dishonest.
In point of fact, it is clearly irrelevant.
Let's be honest: like everyone, I surely have many failings I am blind to. Probably these including massive, debilitating personal failures. And still, I am aware of at least some of my many flaws, and I'm willing to talk about how I am trying to improve with an interviewer. Perhaps not the weaknesses which you would impute to me, but other ones.
The question is not to correctly identify an applicant's greatest weakness (how would the interviewer verify this?), or for the applicant enumerate every weakness. It's to discuss one weakness. So whether I'm oblivious or idiotic or anything else you call me has nothing to do with anything, except as an expression of your own incoherent anger.
Here's what you said up top: "Why do people hate the greatest weakness question? I have never minded receiving it, and I often ask people the same."
After receiving an answer, your story changed a little. Now it was about "one" weakness. And a bit further down, you complete the reversal by asserting that asking about the greatest weakness is pointless, since people's answers can't be verified.
So you often ask a question you don't ask because it's silly. Got it.
I think what this exchange demonstrates is that you don't need to explicitly ask "what's your greatest weakness" to get some idea about the problems you may encounter in working with an individual. Indeed, you can get solid information about a person from a conversation about the whether if you're paying close enough attention to what they actually say. Conducting the interview at a restaurant and watching how they treat the waiter is an especially good way to to get a reliable quick-read. Observations like these won't tell you who is perfect for the job, but they will tell you who is to be avoided.
The key to these revealing moments is that the person you're considering isn't feeling on the spot at the time. That's why anxiety-producing questions are so unproductive. The interview situation provides enough nervousness on its own. Far better to relieve some of that pressure, allow people to be themselves, and just see what happens next.
It's pointless as far as discovering a real weakness in my opinion, but as somebody else said, I do think its useful to see whether someone is able to spin things for social or political reasons. For example if someone answers that question poorly, they may not handle other stressful business situations that require tact.
A far better way of getting the same information would be asking "What skills or abilities are you hoping to develop here?" followed with "What kind of stuff do you see as a sub-par use of your time?" and "What would you be happiest about knowing you never had to deal with again?"
By asking slightly less direct questions, you're likely to get far more direct answers.
I would spin my work history to fit whatever (true) narrative I am telling about my life at the moment. Currently that narrative is how much my family responsibilities impact my ability to work.
I see the greatest weakness question as a negotiating opportunity for me to present whatever I most want to be accommodated on. Currently that would be my family responsibilities, though normally it is how important it is for my ability to focus and be sane that I have some social time.
The conflict question I would immediately respond to with the time that I wound up being the person that both a very competent lead developer and some grumpy sysadmins would talk to. In the end, even though what they were doing was not what I was supposed to be doing, I was appointed by my manager to be the official go between between them. Not exactly fun, and not something I want to repeat, but the story reflects well on me.
Just be honest and be yourself.
The best interviews are with the team you are interviewing to be part of, and are highly conversational. Skills can be taught, and bullshit can be seen through. Speaking of technical interviews, it's easy to tell if you are regurgitating a textbook or actually demonstration comprehension. But the most important thing to come from these interviews is whether or not you will work well with the team, and questions like "what is your biggest weakness" doesn't say anything about that.
"Just be honest and be yourself" is necessary but insufficient. You really should understand how interviewers think and work to be interviewed successfully.
Also as an interviewer, the people trying to answer "the right way" never get past first round. I want someone that's genuine, not someone just trying to pick the right answers to get the job.
I love this question. To me, the above reads as "we don't value honesty as much as you do"