Asking job applicants about their greatest weaknesses is the worst thing you can do in the interviews. Applicants hate this question and so do recruiters. Moreover, it is absolutely useless for making the decision about who to hire. These words open a recent article on ERE.net written by Ryan Daly from Hogan Assessment Systems, a company known worldwide that focuses on psychological assessments of job seekers.
"Even if we managed to get a completely honest answer, would it even matter?" asks Ryan Daly and answers that it would not. More important, he says, is to identify applicants' strengths. He supports this answer with the following three reasons.
1. Most people do not know the correct answer. They do not know what others think about them. The fact that they consider themselves smart and funny does not have any predictive value. Neither has what they say about what they consider as a weakness.
2. The average intelligent applicant knows how to answer in a way that presents his weakness as not affecting his possible performance in the job he is applying for. Often, he really is able to organize his work so that the weakness plays no role. For example, if he knows he has a problem with procrastination, he uses applications to remind him of important dates.
3. Most employees do not fail because of their greatest weaknesses, but due to overused strengths. A manager whose main advantage is the ability to perceive details may, for example, become an unbearable micromanager.
"I’m certainly not saying that weaknesses don’t impact our performance - they do," said Daly, "but weaknesses are easy to spot, and easy to compensate or correct. Because overused strengths are born in our blind spots, they can be hard to spot until they’ve already had a devastating effect."
What do you think?
-Kk-