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Comment by shaggyfrog | Hacker News Reader

Hearing “What’s your biggest weakness?” from an interviewer should be a strong red flag for a candidate that they don’t know what they’re doing.

Not only is it a manipulative question, the response is basically meaningless if the candidate knows the game, because you’ll get back a scripted answer. Those who don’t know the game and answer honestly will only hurt their chances at getting the job.

The only question I think it worse is “what would your former manager say about you?”

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What's funny is apparently these managers know and want a scripted ("rehearsed") answer. It's a mating dance.

In my experience they don't. They want to know if you're a reasonable, self-aware person who can communicate effectively.

Let's say you name a reasonable weakness that can easily be improved upon and that doesn't spell disaster for your ability to do your job. And let's say they reject you.

Either they're a terrible company to work for, or they have a huge mistake in their interview process. In the former case you don't want to work for a terrible company, so great, they just saved you years of pain. In the latter case, hey, mistakes happen. That's out of your control. Life is random sometimes. Besides, it's highly unlikely to be significant enough to tank your entire interview.

> Let's say you name a reasonable weakness that can easily be improved upon and that doesn't spell disaster for your ability to do your job.

To the recipient, that is equally likely the rehearsed answer, because from high school on your told to think of one to reply to that question that fits into what your interviewer probably thinks is reasonable.

And there's the entire thing where some people answering truthfully would tell the interviewer things the interviewer isn't legally allowed to ask about, which is always a lovely strategy for running an interview.

The stereotypical rehearsed answer is the Michael Scott one, where you dodge the question by actually naming a strength and pretending it's a weakness.

In my experience working at places full of smart, talented, ambitious people looking to fill a role with a similar caliber of person: don't do that.

Most people knows that you should give a "real" but insignificant weakness just as you said you wanted in the previous post instead of non-weaknesses. If you don't think that people have practiced such answers and carefully picked their "weakness" then you are ignorant.

I don't know, I find it quite amusing when the engineer kind of ask the question in a "ohhh ummm, another interview question.... oh yea, *chuckles, this one" way. Giving a honest answer where I detail my relevant weakness while also addressing how I usually mange/compensate for it have often lead to some relaxing tension in the interview.

If it comes from a HR person, the above attitude only backfires, but I don't want to work at a place with such a heavy HR filter put on everyone anyway.

I recently interviewed at a place where TWO different people asked me that and I was flabbergasted. Then they weren't sure so wanted a follow up phone screen where they asked it AGAIN.

I like to turn the question around, something like, what do I want to learn more about, and even phrase my response like that (Well, one thing I am learning more about is ____).

It's a dumb question, but you can just say "I can be too detail oriented sometimes!" and move on to more interesting points of conversation.

You definitely should NOT do this.

As the interviewee, dodging a question with a fake trite answer because you think it's dumb is a great way to signal that you're abnormally uncooperative and/or bad at communicating. And this is a question largely meant to determine your communication skills.

It boggles my mind that people think an interview is a great place to display smug, passive-aggressive hostility. But then again, this is why we have interviews…

To add to it, I would be even more worried if they intend to ask such stupid questions but did not have the time to ask, then the candidate misses out on hidden red flags.

What are the strategies to expose hidden red flags?

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