Job interview questions are weird. They are often quite probing, questions that you may not even have discussed with close friends. Where do you see yourself in five years? What is your greatest accomplishment? Why don’t polar bears eat penguins? These questions are mostly not meant to be answered off the cuff, however more revealing that might be on a potential employee’s character and disposition. When a potential employer asks you why you left your previous position, it is usually a faux pas to talk about how your manager was verbally abusive. The correct answer is a sanitized description of one’s own growth, the question a test of how well you can compartmentalize and perform.
A specific pair of questions that I find objectionable are “what are your strengths” and “what are your weaknesses”. Partially, I just object to the posturing. Someone who provides an honest and thorough account of their own weaknesses is unlikely to be hired. At least presenting a strength as a weakness has fallen out of style (ye olde ‘I am a perfectionist). Current crowdsourced wisdom[1] is to present a historical weakness that you’ve addressed, a demonstration of one’s ability to perform social gymnastics more than anything.
What I really want to say in an interview, though, is that I disagree with the premise of the question. More precisely, I think that the right way to think about strengths and weaknesses is as a unified whole. Strengths and weaknesses are contextual and follow from each other. Perfectionism, for example, is not inherently a strength or a weakness. If your job involves fastidious attention to detail, has generous deadlines and allows you to focus on a single project then it’s a strength. If your job requires you to juggle many projects delivered to short deadlines, then it’s a weakness.
I propose we should think about strengths and weaknesses like a design problem. Designs are not universally good or bad, but rather are more or less suited to their purpose. Apple, for example, make their products more accessible in part by limiting their customizability. This is not inherently a strength or a weakness of their products: it appeals to some consumers but not others.
I therefore propose the following alternative question: ‘what makes you suited to this job?’. I’ll give an example from my own work experience. For the last three years I have worked as a policy analyst in the BC public service. I did a good job, I think, but one thing I constantly struggled with was a desire for more time to really dig into the subject matter. I like to dive deep into a topic, immerse myself in it, mull over all the nuances and complexities. In public policy there is rarely time for this kind of deep work, and so I felt perpetually rushed and unprepared. I felt like I struggled to present material because I was always aware of how much I didn’t know, and I was perpetually unsatisfied with my work. I do not consider this a weakness, but rather a misalignment between what the job required and what I brought to the table.
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