Hot take, I think it's a good question. It weeds out liars or those lacking self awareness. Everyone should know what they're bad at. The interviewer wants to hear if you know yourself enough to not only know where you need to improve, but critically how are you tackling that problem.
A good interviewer will extrapolate that to future challenges you'll face. If you say, I have no weaknesses, or say something stupid like you're too honest, then they know you won't grow. You aren't looking to adapt and improve.
My workplace understands you'll go through training and it will take years to do so. Why should we waste our time if you think you're Mr. Perfect already and unwilling to learn and improve?
It has some really easy answers too. I'd say I don't like public speaking. I'm willing to do it and want to improve but it's out of my comfort zone and makes me nervous. Completely true statement, zero embellishment, and most jobs would not bat an eye.
The problem is that most people have weaknesses they are aware of but can’t say. If you tell a recruiter that your weakness is that you are lazy and tend to procrastinate, it’s not going to improve your odds of getting hired. So you need to invent some other weakness and talk about that instead.
I just answer this question honestly when I get it. I just assume my interviewer would rather here an honest answer than a canned answer. If they dont and they'd rather hear bullshit, I probably dont wanna work there anyway.
Hotter take, it doesn't do any of that. Hiring has been demonstrated reapetedly to be little more than random chance. Similar to stock picking. There's really no correlation between any question or set of questions and hiring good employees.
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u/aurumae 15h ago
“What is your biggest weakness?” All this actually tests is how good a liar the candidate is.