Well I don’t think I have any more 2,000 word essays up my sleeve for a while — hopefully this will give people a chance to read the deluge of posts in the past couple of days, which I think have all been excellent. Instead I’ll just point people to a fascinating post at “Volokh”:http://volokh.com/. Actually, the post itself is not that interesting. It just asks “what do you say in a job interview when they ask you “What is your greatest weakness?”:http://volokh.com/posts/1117042551.shtml. This is, of course, a topic that comes up constantly when grad students talk about finding an academic position. The interesting thing is the comments — where employers talk about how they evaluate your answers. Worth reading.
3 thoughts on “What’s Your Greatest Weakness?”
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I think that the whole issue says a lot about the culture of various work spaces. In each kind of work space, there seems to be an ideal to which certain people aspire in terms of finding particular personality types that are suited for particular roles within the company. In some cases, perhaps the employers actually look for people who have mastered the art of passing interviews (a.k.a. the art of BSing) but, as we can see from the various responses, some employers look deeper than that and look for actual personality traits.
As for myself, I’ve never read any books on how to answer job interview questions. I always used the honest approach (yes, even to the “biggest flaw” questions) and never had problems finding work. I think there’s a lot to be said for sincerity. In any case, I’ve gotten jobs for which I had no prior experience (teaching, for example) based largely on my outgoing personality and my willingness to admit what my problems were, with the added emphasis on knowing how I could fix them.
I used to try to answer this question honestly. I didn’t get those jobs. Obviously. So now I answer “I’m too darned honest” — that’s right, I lie. About being honest. Maybe it’s the postmodernist’s love of irony that I just can’t keep down. But it’s sufficiently a non-answer to keep me from blowing the interview.
As to what Nancy said, I took some interview training courses a dcade ago (I was supervising a store on the US Army base in Heidelberg, and the Army is nothing if not committed to quality training of its employees!). Although I’ve never since been in a position to interview someone for a job, I myself hve been interviewed for many, many jobs since then — and I just want to shake my interviewers and tell them how it’s done. Because the fact is, very few people know how to interview job applicants, and most of them go with their “gut feelings” — with the interview just an exercise in official-sounding discourse (and thus a display of authority) to rationalize the decision. Which is one reason why women and minorities still get a raw deal in the USAnian job market — however neutrally the questions are phrased (and it is a ritual that is fraught with dangers on both sides — the interviewer who slips up may well face harassment and discrimination lawsuits), the deciding factor is often a subconscious hunch that is informed by all kinds of unexamined assumptions.
How about “I find I always tend to overprep for my classes” –maybe the whole point of such a question is to see if you are clued in enough to realize that the answer is supposed to take the form of a positive disguised (but not to well) as a negative. But seriously, I’ve never been asked that question at an academic job interview. Do have answers to questions like what courses do you want to teach, and try to have answers that show you’ve looked into their program. For research places think about “where do you see yourself in 10 years?” at some places you might want to think about “how do you see yourself involving undergraduates in your research?”