Weaknesses are Real

I’ve been engaging recently on LinkedIn and a lot of “experts” love to dunk on “tell me about your greatest weakness” as a particularly terrible question. Here is why they are wrong.

1. You need past data to predict future performance. Some of this data will be positive (accomplishments, strengths) and some of it will be negative (mistakes, weaknesses).
2. When an interviewer conducts the conversation with great rapport (legitimate curiosity and fascination), people can and will open up to you.
3. This is especially true if you practice non-judgment during the interviews. People *love* telling stories about themselves to an interested and non-judgmental person.
4. Many interviewers assume that you cannot obtain *real* data from this question, because the candidate will simply get a fake answer (“I’m a perfectionist”) and that this is the end of the question. No! You’ll simply follow it up with “What’s an example of when this cost you?” and cycle the candidate for a real weakness. This gets easy with practice.
5. The correct mental model for high-performers: spiky individuals who are strong in some domains and significantly weaker in others. Of course this person has some weaker areas.
6. Asking about negatives is one of the best ways to learn about self-awareness, low ego, growth mindset, etc. You will miss out on this data if you don’t ask these types of questions.
7. High-performing candidates will *feel* more holistically understood when they are able to share all of their professional facets in depth and you *still* make an offer to them. It's not shallow—it's rigorous—and they model the future teammates they are about to join on the basis of how selective the process feels.

The data is there. The advantages are clear. Learn about weaknesses (and mistakes) in addition to other questions, and start making better decisions immediately.