If you understand that up front and give me a chance, you will find I am quickly and consistently one of your strongest employees. If you are not understanding about that, your loss. There will be other employers willing to put faith in my references and work history instead of a few stressful minutes in person.

When I don’t feel as strong a personal stake in the outcome, I am just fine. I conduct trainings and interviews, give presentations, my entire job right now is communicating with coworkers and clients. I never have any problem with those interactions. Interview me for a job, though, and I just have no clue what to do or say, no matter how much I research or rehearse beforehand.

Second strongest weakness is time management. Not because I can’t meet deadlines, but because I am too willing to take on tasks outside my immediate job duties to make sure projects get finished on schedule and to our clients’ satisfaction. I am also more of a perfectionist than many of the people I work with, and sometimes it is easier to take the task on myself than it is to convince others why they should care. So I usually feel stressed and out of time even if all of my responsibilities are being completed on schedule.

I handled it by saying that I COULD give them a canned standard answer, but that I prefer to be upfront. Then I went on to say that the flip side of my analytical abilities is a tendency to go too in depth, to drill down a couple of levels beyond what is in the best interests of productivity in my quest to cover all bases, but that I am aware of it and work to balance it. The interview panel seemed to receive it well

Another weakness is that I have a lot of initiative. This makes it hard for some managers to manage me because I’m always trying to think outside the box and if they are in the box, well you get the picture.

I usually don’t bother with behavioral questions, but my favorite is: “Did you watch the Celtics?”

I wrote a blog post on how candidates might answer this question, using lessons from a recent interview between Katie Couric and President Obama: http://blog.seattleinterviewcoach.com/2009/01/ace-your-job-interview-questions-like.html

Great to turn a positive into a negative, but show me the evidence of the behaviour!

As for myself I don’t have any weaknesses, I have ‘development areas’!

great post- we should all ask ourselves what our weaknesses are and try to turn them into strengths (even when we aren’t preparing for an interview)