259. What is Your Greatest Weakness?

A favourite ques­tion in job inter­views is “what is your great­est weak­ness?” I always find the ques­tion puz­zling. It is puz­zling because nowa­days the per­son who inter­views you is rarely, say, a hard drink­ing build­ing super­vi­sor who wants to know if you really can lay bricks. No, it will be some half-formed cream puff who has never laid a brick, and thinks that a ‘C’ pass in Psy­chol­ogy 101 has given them the key to the human soul. Part of the text book clev­er­ness of these HR per­sons is to assume that every per­son being inter­viewed is lying. There­fore, to give a good inter­view is to impress the HR per­son is that you can lie cooly, with­out a flicker of embar­rass­ment. If you can lie in your own inter­ests, pre­sum­ably you can lie in the inter­ests of the com­pany too. So this is the prob­lem with “what is your great­est weak­ness?”. The proper answer actu­ally depends upon the fetishes, fears and fan­tasies of the HR per­son. Does he secretly pull the wings off but­ter­flies, or does she have night­mares about break­ing her stiletto heels in an esca­la­tor? Until you have such crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion, you don’t really know which lie will make him/her feel all warm and fuzzy inside…