What is your answer to the interview question, "What are your weaknesses?

Good Day to you, maplethorej! So, do interviewers for employers truly ask such a question? I suppose that is the same kind of place whose interviewers ask: "What do you do when there is a lag period at work?"

And so on and so forth. Please forgive me for being cranky, but I believe that question is GARBAGE ( I know this question did not originate with you, maplethorpej). I suppose I would have more patience with such a question if I truly believed that if "YOU ARE THE BEST YOU, YOU CAN BE" that you can fairly expect to earn the esteem of a potential employer, and then by dint of hard work, intelligence, and loyalty, gain deserved job security and fair prospects for advancement and all that.

But in light of this latest financial and economic crisis we are still living through, I think we can say that the "world" has not worked that way for a very, very, very long time. Corporations will not hesitate to fire people (and this is well documented) to give a boost to their stock price, quite independent of worker performance and all that. You see, the stock market loves it when corporation "trim the fat," as it were.

This is just one example. In my opinion, a decent prospective employer SHOULD NOT ask such a fascile question. Now, if this is the situation you are facing now and a prospective employer asks you this, well, I would just walk out of the f**k*ng interview.

Find a prosective employer that does not ask such stupid a** and offensive questions. Or you can go the other way and after giving a recitation of your strengths you could say: "My weaknesses are cannibalism, but I'm working on that in therapy; I do like fire, THE BEAUTIFUL FIRE! But I don't play with it anymore.

Let's see, I"m have a thing about women's underwear.... oh and oh yeah, I really enjoy pulling the wings off of butterflies. "Of course, if your're going to do something like that, you should probably use an alias and do it in a different state far away from the one in which you live and work. LOL.

:D Kidding! This is me kidding! Take it easy.

I think such a question should come with time restraints in place. Am I really expected to give an honest answer to that? If no, then it would be useful to do away with that whole thing about .

. .. Answering the questions to the best of my ability. Hell, why not just be someone else.

I could pretend to be. ... .. Do you see how little attention span I have? That's really not a weakness - it's a result of one or two million other factors.

I forget.

That's easy - describe your strengths as weaknesses. I work too hard and sometimes stay late to finish a job. Sometimes I'm a little detailed oriented and check & recheck finished work to make sure I didn't miss anything.

Sometimes I connect with customers and engage in conversations too long and not stop the chat so I can get back to work. impactinterview.com/2009/01/how-to-answ.

Thank you both for the responses. I more or less expected ptosis's response, but, Wingedcentaur, you certainly made me laugh! Thank you for the very long and detailed opinion!

Quite an interesting way to look at it :D.

A good one I like to use is that I'm a perfectionist, in that I don't believe in doing a job that isn't 100%. Again, like some of you have already said, it's turning what can be seen as a weakness into a strength.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.