Resume tower · floor

What are your weaknesses, and why the safe answers fail

The reason what are your weaknesses is hard has almost nothing to do with the question and everything to do with the advice around it. Nearly every page answering it hands you a list of acceptable weaknesses to pick from — which is exactly what makes a prepared answer audible to somebody who has interviewed a hundred people.

There is a published alternative, it is two sentences long, and it comes from a source with nothing to sell.

That is the whole structure. Everything below is an explanation of why it works and how to build your own version, but if you stop reading here you already have what you came for.

Why the second half carries the answer. The interviewer is not collecting a flaw. They are finding out whether you can look at your own work accurately and do something about what you see — which is the single most useful thing to know about somebody you are about to hire. A weakness with no remedy attached tells them you have noticed. A weakness with a mechanism attached tells them you have acted.

That is also why the remedy has to be real and already running. “I’m working on it” is an intention. “I write out the steps at the start of each project” is a practice with a beginning, and it can be described, which is the test.

How to find yours, if nothing comes to mind. Do not start from the question — start from the last year. What did you get feedback on more than once? What takes you longer than it takes the people around you? What do you avoid until it becomes urgent? Something in those three answers is true, and true is the only requirement, because the second half of the answer is where the work happens.

Then check it against the job. The weakness should be real but it should not be the core competence of the role you want, and there is nothing dishonest about that choice — you are being asked to pick one thing out of many, and picking the one that is both true and survivable is judgement rather than evasion.

The strengths question is its twin, and the same source is more specific about it. For strengths, the careers service says: “Plan your answers around 2 or 3 examples that are relevant to the job.” Note that it asks for examples rather than adjectives. The same discipline applies in both directions — a strength without an example is a claim, and a weakness without a remedy is a confession.

What if they ask for three? Some interviewers do, deliberately, because the second and third are the ones you have not rehearsed. Prepare two properly and be willing to think aloud for the third. Thinking aloud is not a failure here — it is a demonstration of the exact capacity the question is testing, and it beats producing a third polished answer that sounds like the first two.

On the pages ranking above this one. Several of them are good, and one is a university business school. But the dominant format is a list of example weaknesses, and lists are self-defeating for this particular question in a way they are not for others: the more widely a good example answer is published, the less it works. The structure above does not have that problem, because the specific content comes from you.

Everything quoted here is from a national careers service, on the date it was read, and the parts that are our reasoning rather than theirs are the ones about how to find your own answer.

What this tower will not do

It will not give you a weakness to use. The whole argument of this page is that a published example answer stops working the moment it is published, and handing you one would be the fastest way to prove it.

It will not tell you to hide anything. The source quoted here says to be honest, and the structure works precisely because the first half is true.

And it will not sell you interview coaching, which is where several of the pages ranking for this question ultimately lead. What holds instead is simple: the two-part structure and the worked example on this page are quoted from a public careers service, on the date they were read.