Navigating through the minefield of interviews

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

What would you say is your greatest weakness?’ – it’s the question that every interviewee dreads and no boss should really dare to ask. Because there’s no right answer to what is really just a smart-ass question from a smug interviewer.

Interviews are meant to bring the best out of a future employee, a chance to show their vision and potential, to give them the chance to sell themselves and to show why they’d be a great addition to the staff.

Instead they’re often an exercise in trick questioning – particularly if the employer is at the end of a long day of asking the same questions to candidates and just wants to liven things up with the odd firecracker under the seat.

Thus you’re ask to draw attention to your biggest weakness, or in effect tell the company you want to work for why you shouldn’t work for them.

So here’s your predicament – should you, on the one hand, be honest enough to admit you are a useless timekeeper, you have unsolvable body odour or you have seriously thought about killing all of the employees in your last place of employment?

Or should you give the sort of smug response that such a stupid question deserves – ‘my greatest weakness is that I’m a perfectionist’ or ‘I work too hard’ or ‘I care too much’.

The laziest question of all is even more of a minefield.

‘What is the one question you were hoping I wouldn’t ask you?’

Because there is just no answer to that.

Interviews are completely artificial anyway and you’d have to think that two hours’ coaching would be the most anyone would need to portray a perfect picture of themselves during a 30 minute grilling.

You dress well, sit upright, smile and look as though this is the chance to make all of your dreams come true.

You give it the full Robbie Keane treatment – “My bedroom wall was covered in posters of Liverpool/Spurs/Celtic/Juventus/Wolves/Coventry/Leeds” depending on who he happened to be joining – in order to convince your new boss that this is your lifetime ambition.

And it’s all gone swimmingly until the ‘greatest weakness’ grenade is lobbed into the room – and now you have a dilemma.

If you’re honest, you’re gone – and if you’re too smart, you’re gone too.

Even if you phrase it wrong; ‘I never know when it’s time to go home’, for example, can sound like you spend hours on end in the pub.

It’s the same thing if they ask you: ‘tell us one thing you’d change about yourself’ or even ‘tell us something you’d change about our operation’.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.