Talking about your strengths is easy, but what about your weaknesses? We recently posed a question to job seekers and employers and it was unanimous that this is the most difficult interview question to answer.

Here we look at how you can work through this and be more prepared, next time.

Start with your strengths, find your weaknesses

First consider your strengths.

To get to these think about how other people may describe you. Let’s say that you would be described as:

• Team Player – you like to work with and towards team goals
• Driven – you plough through your work with out any nudging along

You have a couple of strengths, now let’s think about the impact of having these strengths in the way that it could be expressed as a weakness.

Following on the example above, you could describe the impact as:

• Having to work on your own – you are more motivated by working as part of a team
• Impatient – You could be impatient at times as you know what you need to do and how to get there

Here you make reference to the strength again, what does the employer remember?

Your weaknesses from people close to you

Another way to consider what your weaknesses is to think what those closest to you would say (i.e. your partner, children, good friends). Take these weaknesses and then put a spin on this to make it relevant to the workplace.

“My partner would say I am impatient and when I think about this in a professional environment, it is simply because the accountant in me wants to meet the proposed deadline.”

“My friends would say that I do not hold back on my opinion which in a professional environment means that I can share my thoughts on a decision where appropriate, of course.”

This example allows you to apply a bit of humour and lightness to a question that usually trips people up.

Using feedback from performance reviews

Consider your previous performance reviews, across your career. Is there something that keeps cropping up as an area of development? So long as this is something not too worrying – i.e. not hitting targets, upsetting colleagues etc then you should be able to make a positive comment about it

“One of the things I have been working on is being more patient with team members encouraging their development, whereas in the early days of my career it was easier to just do the work! This will help build my management skills”

“During my performance reviews my manager has told me to raise my profile within the business so I have been trying to be more visible at meetings by preparing and contributing more”

Here you are able to show you can reflect on your areas of development and what you are doing or have done about it.

Summary

In summary you need to spin the response to reflect on your strengths or how you will be making progress with that particular weakness. This question should not be a deal breaker – the more you have thought about this the easier this question gets!

If you have any thoughts or suggestions please feel free to comment. Practice makes perfect!