Effectiveness of "what is your greatest strength/weakness" interview questions [closed]

Question

As someone who is now finding himself on the other end of the interview table, I'm wondering how useful these questions are from an employer's perspective. Some of my coworkers think they're good because you can see "how they respond," but I'm not convinced it tells you anything useful, for several reasons:

• It's not a very comfortable question and can lead people to twist their answers, even if not on purpose
• People may not fully know their greatest strengths or weaknesses (i.e. judge them by their peers)
• Explaining what a strength is isn't as good as showing it
• I still don't know any more about the candidate afterwards

The rationale of my coworkers is that it can help weed out people that give ridiculous responses, like one guy that said his greatest strength was "his intellect" or people that try to turn the weakness question into a strength like "I work too hard." But I think there's more effective ways to determine such things. If you want to see if someone's smart, ask them technical questions. If you want to see if someone is productive, look at their work history. If you want to see how someone reacts under stress or change, ask them how they've dealt with it and ask for concrete examples.

What are people's thoughts on these questions, from the perspective of an interviewer? What do they really tell you about a candidate, and what are better alternatives? How do I convince my colleagues of this?

Answer 1

Not very.

• Any question for which a good percentage of candidates will have a canned response is of limited value, since you're often not getting the real them. Everyone and their cousin has heard of "what is your greatest weakness."
• The answer encourages lying: honest people will describe a fault and end up looking bad, while less honest people will spin a strength as a fault and look good.
• The question is so dated that, in my opinion, it reflects poorly on your company to ask it.

Answer 2

I once had a job interview where the hiring person was a dev, and he asked me to cut some code in the language they needed, right then and there on the whiteboard. I did what he asked, he looked at it, nodded, and asked "Can you start tomorrow?"

Asking BS questions like "name your biggest strengths and weaknesses" is the most egregious waste of time ever invented by pseudo-intellectual MBA Human Resource specialists.

Answer 3

The value of that question seems obvious to me.

Someone that knows his strength and weaknesses will be a lot more efficient that the one that doesn't know what he can do well and what he shouldn't do (or improve)

In martial arts, this is one of the first things you have to learn. Because it determines how your attack and defense strategy will be.

I do think that it's the same in life in general, including daily work.

Answer 4

It doesn't matter what your colleagues say. It doesn't matter what we say.

If you don't find any value in asking what the candidate's greatest weakness is, then don't ask it. Please don't feel like the Interview Police will come beating down your door if you don't ask at least three of the following five questions:

• Why do you want to work here?
• What's your greatest strength/weakness?
• Where do you want to be in five years?
• What kind of plant would you be?
• Tell me about a project that didn't go well.

Ask the questions that let you assess the value of the candidate as it applies to you.

Answer 5

In and amongst other questions I don't think it's bad, in and of itself. If you are looking for the "one question to rule them all" candidate, this one is not it. Ideally a candidate has some awareness of what happens during interviews and will have a good answer where they admit to an honest weakness that they have (NOTE: we ALL have weaknesses - somebody who claims NONE is a giant red flag) but also tells you what they're doing to address it.

Example: "I sometimes tend to obsess over getting every last bit of information up front before doing any development. In the past that has led to some slow project starts. Now I try to get some basic functionality sketched out first and then iteratively fill it in as I get feedback from the users."

You admitted a weakness (instead of "ready, aim, fire" you're more of a "ready, aim, aim, aim, just a little for data, aim, aim...") but recognize it and are taking steps to deal with it.

Remember - you are going to have to work with this person day-in and day-out for a long time. You will see them more than your own family. Whatever you can do to figure things out about them you should do.

Answer 6

I will speak from a position of an interviewee. When I prepare for an interview, I always take time to think about these questions. "Your strengths" question may be easier to answer, because all of us are proud of our own accomplishments and can talk about them. In an interview people will almost always try to over-glorify their accomplishments to try to look better. When it comes to "your weaknesses" question, it is very hard to answer it completely honestly and say something constructive and negative about yourself. Either, an interviewee will pick a weakness that's pretty minor, and will not give an interviewer any useful information or try to turn a weakness into a "strength". For example, "I think my weakness is that I tend to overwork myself." Either way, all the weaknesses and strengths will become obvious during the probation period. That's what it's for - to see if the employee-employer relationship is mutually beneficial.

Previous employers may be a better source of information for these kind of questions. Ask for references and follow up.

Answer 7

Behavioral interviews aren't necessarily a great thing either though. Here is a link to a blog post that while it is a over a couple of years old, it is worth mentioning on this subject to my mind.

Canned answers are what kill the effectiveness of the question, at least to my mind. Most people have looked up various answers to this and just picked one that seems like, "Yeah, I'm kinda, sorta, maybe a bit like that."

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Validating how someone did something has a couple of points I'd note:

• Sometimes a dumb thing is done that isn't likely to be repeated. When someone does royally screw up there may be alternatives that the person will take. For example, most adults would not touch a hot stove with their bare hand but a child may not understand the warning and will learn after getting a burn not to do that.

• References are where I'd look into some things here. For example, if you want to see how someone handled a failed project, asking a former boss or co-worker may be better as an outsider may have a different take on things. However, some people may fake their references so this does carry a caution to my mind.

Answer 8

I'm going though a personnal evaluation at the moment, and i'm in the middle of this very exercise. Only there's a twist; i have to ask colleagues and friends what my strengths/weaknesses are, and not look at the result before having compiled my own list

This is very interesting because it makes some discrespancies between what you think you are and what other perceives about you obvious.

"I think i'm a hard worker, and i'm very serious and ..."

"He's an obsessive control freak who programs so defensively his code is unreadable and ..."

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In interviews, i think this may be a kind of low level sanity check. "Do you know the basics, did you prepare?" they seem to say. Or perhaps it's just that this question used to trip people, to shake them up.

But now the question is so widely known it's become useless; interviewers keep asking it out of habit because that's what they've learned. Interviewees keep trying to game it out of self-preservation...

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Perhaps it could be updated; instead of "what's your weakness", ask "hey, if you could go back in time one year, what is the thing you'd like to change the most?"

Chances are, the interviewee will have a chance to talk about a moment when he didn't manage to reach his standards, but in a positive way: "well this didn't work out, so i'd... to have it succeed". The interviewer has an idea of what the interviewee didn't like, and the interviewee shows he did learn from a mistake.

The same could be done with the strengths: "if you had to showcase one thing you did during last year, what would it be?"

what do you think? Does it keep the goal of the original question but in better clothes?

Answer 9

I got this question a little while back (not for a programming job though) that I liked:

"What is the ideal/'golden standard' [profession]?", which was followed by "How do you compare to that?" and others.

It is very similar, but somewhat disassociates them describing themselves and describing the ideal (greatest weakness would be where there is the largest difference, strength: the greatest alignment).

Answer 10

I think the effectiveness of the question depends on your ability to read people. A guy that is obviously saying bullsh*t have better chance to be saying bullsh*t later when you hire him. A guy that give a canned answer also gives up unconscious hint about his personnality (it usually infer a certain fear about authority - which can be a good thing - but it's still something you can infer about his personality).

So no I don't think the question is useless unless you are pretty poor at reading people (it's a skill). All soft questions like this one is mostly to get to know the guy and see if he is a good fit for you. Maybe this is not the best question for that and it's totally ok not to ask it if you don't feel like it but I don't think it is as useless as you seem to think it is.

Answer 11

The purpose of the "greatest weakness" question is greatly misunderstood!

The idea is not to talk about your weakness as a person (e.g. "boy, I'm a workaholic!"), it's to give you an opportunity to be up front about what they are already going to find out. It's about how well of a match you are for the job requirements.

For example:

• "Your ad says you want svn admin experience, but I've only worked with hg, however I'm fast at learning."
• "Your ad says that fluency in Spanish is desired, but I only took two years of it in high school."

Naturally, you should do the same comparison of your skills/experience for the "greatest strength" question too.

Also, if the ad really describes you perfectly, when asked for your weakness simply say "I don't think there are any. I'm a good fit for this job."

I'm trying to imagine how the original meaning of this question got to be misinterpreted to be about personality, and it probably happens when a more junior interviewer is given the list of questions to ask and they don't know what it means. If you are in the position to change this at your company, reword the question to be specific: "This job requires A, B, C, what are your weaknesses in these areas?" [The question actually does the interviewee a favor: Their resume might show no experience with X, but you might find something that compensates for that.]