12 Ways You Can Be Asked About Your Weaknesses in an Interview

Employers ask you about your weaknesses in job interviews for a lot of reasons…because they want a realistic assessment of you, because they want to compare you to other candidates, or because they want to see how you react to a difficult question.

However, not all of their inquiries about your weaknesses are so obvious. They know that you’ll probably be ready for the big one, and so they have a lot of different ways to get at what they want to know. They can ask about how people criticize you, what you need the most development in, what scares you about this new job (because that could reflect not being ready for it), and more.

It’s important that you be ready to answer these kinds of questions.

Below are 12 different ways interviewers ask you about your weaknesses.

Click on the question to go to the answer.

• Describe a time your work was criticized and how you handled it.

• Have you ever had difficulty working with a supervisor/manager?

• How did you deal with the situation the last time your boss chastised you or strongly or disagreed with a statement, a plan or a decision you made?

• If you could relive the last 10 years of your life, what would you do differently?

• What are your advantages and disadvantages?

• What are your least favorite things to do in your role as X?

• What did you like or dislike about your previous jobs?

• What do people most often criticize about you?

• What excites you and scares you about this position?

• What is your greatest weakness?

• What would your manager say was the area you needed the most development in?

• Why haven’t you been promoted?

These questions are all from my series How to Answer Interview Questions on my blog. The series contains 101 tough job interview questions and answers. I encourage you to explore these and practice your answers to these questions so you can ace your interview and get the offer.