YOU NEED TO KNOW THESE EASY TIPS FOR TALKING ABOUT STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES

What was your biggest failure?

Failure is so important to learning but can be so hard to talk about. When talking about your failure, you can do this in a positive way. We have given you an example below:  

 Situation: I was struggling to get people to visit my website and therefore was under pressure from the CEO, directors and my line manager.

Reaction: I reacted by lashing out at my team and blaming them for my failure which resulted in low morale in my team and them being afraid to approach me for support.

Recovery: When I realised that this was happening, I spoke to my manager and explained how this was impacting me and that I needed support. I did some additional training to see how we could try different tactics to get visitors to the website and implemented these. I also spoke to my team and apologised to them. I asked them to give me feedback on how I could be a better manager going forward.

This shows that you can recover and learn from failure and have the self-awareness to know when you need to ask help. It’s so important to talk about the lessons we learn from failure so that we can grow and reflect.

What are your weaknesses?

No one likes to admit that they have weaknesses, but the reality is that we’re all human. Employers will be expecting some self-awareness in your answer to this question and want to see a willingness to improve. You might say that you’re impatient, disorganised or struggle with procrastination. However, you can follow this up by saying that you are learning about why you procrastinate to help you tackle this weakness. You might struggle with controlling every aspect of a situation or have the inability to self-regulate which means you burnout quicker than others might.

Being a bit vulnerable and very honest with your answer to this question will mean that the interviewer(s) will have a better understanding of you as a person and any support you might need if you are to get the job.

What are three things your former manager would like you to improve on?

If you work at a company that is up to date with employee reviews and gives you feedback regularly, this question will be easy to answer. Before your interview, read back through your employee review and take notes on areas your manager thinks you could improve on. You can talk about how you have been trying to improve on these since your last review but the interviewer(s) just wants to know that you’ve got self-awareness to know where your weaknesses lie.

However, if your current employers are behind on their paperwork and your employee review forms aren’t recent this question might be hard for you to answer. If you have time before your interview, you could request for an employee review to be held to give you this information. Or, you can reflect on what you would say if you were a manager. Maybe you’re a bit chatty or you’re excel skills could use some work, whatever it is really think about it and make sure they’re honest and not in the job description or person specification for the job you’re interviewing for.

What are your strengths?

‘My greatest strength is that I care too much.’ Great, but what does this tell the interviewer about you? Interviewers have usually conducted hundreds of interviews before yours so while you want to be truthful, you want to be as memorable as possible. Saying that you care too much isn’t going to make you stand out but having strengths like conflict resolution, time management or excel skills could give you a better chance than your competition. You could say strengths that are specific to the role you’re interviewing for, such as you have strong personal skills, you’re persuasive or you can build rapport quickly.

What were your bosses’ strengths/weaknesses?

When you’re asked this question, the person asking wants to know what you have learnt from pervious managers. Like us, managers are human too and will have both strengths and weaknesses. When answering this, think of things that you can take or have taken a lesson from such as communication. If your manager was an effective communicator, you learnt how to create open communication channels that mean that teams are working well together to complete jobs before the deadline. However, if your manager didn’t communicate effectively, you learnt that poor communication leaves teams feeling confused and disjointed, meaning that work is stressful and deadlines are often missed.