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By Monica Torres – Ladders

What’s your biggest weakness? Avoid these terrible answers. Instead, don’t just play up your strengths, but think about how to discuss your failures.

What’s your biggest weakness?

This interview question has tripped up many a candidate. You prepare yourself to play up your strengths, but many candidates don’t spend as much time thinking about how to discuss their failures. Hiring managers ask this question because they want to understand the full story of your career and they want to test how you respond to everyday pressure. No matter what you answer, most experts agree that you should briefly own up to your shortcomings, so that you can spend the majority of the answer showing recruiters how you’ve learned and improved from the experience.

But not everyone treats the question this way…

Biggest weakness examples…

Looking at Reddit answers and recruiting experts’ advice, Ladders rounded up the worst ways to respond to this question, so we can learn from these cautionary tales.

My biggest weakness is “I’m a perfectionist.”

The real question being asked with “What’s your biggest weakness?” is “How are you going think critically and face adversity in my organization?” When you answer that you seek perfection, that doesn’t address the real underlying question being asked, and it doesn’t give recruiters insight into how you work with others and what you’ve overcome.

Like saying “I’m too passionate,” saying that you have perfectionist tendencies as your biggest weakness is a non-specific answer that does not tell a recruiter a story about your career. Not mentioning any weakness also makes you sound defensive. As Forbes advises job seekers on this question, “Be honest and specific about key weaknesses that are relevant to the job. Be prepared to tick them off on your fingers without any spin or rationalizing.”

My biggest weakness is “identifying weaknesses.”

One Reddit user said that when they were asked the question, “What is your greatest weakness?”, they responded, “Identifying weaknesses.” It would not be surprising to experts that this user said they didn’t end up getting the job. When you say you have a hard time recognizing weakness, you’re telling a manager that you don’t know how to address failure, conflict, and hardship.

Saying that you have a hard time seeing weaknesses in yourself and other people also makes it sound as if you don’t understand interpersonal dynamics. It suggests that you’re not good at reading people’s emotions and motivations.

My biggest weakness is “condescension.”

Sometimes, you can be a little too honest and transparent. One Reddit user said they answered that, “People say I can be condescending. That’s when you talk down to people.” The user didn’t elaborate on what happened when they said this answer, but it would not be surprising if this didn’t inspire confidence in a hiring manager about how you, the self-proclaimed condescending candidate, would act on their team.

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