This is a very common question asked by HR personnel to candidates.

Remember that interviewers these days hardly ever get impressed by flowery responses.

So be careful while tackling this one.

Possible Answer #1:
“I have several strengths namely – I am patient, committed, honest and self-motivated.

I am the biggest dreamer I have ever come across! I forgive easily and hate to keep grudges in my heart.

My greatest weakness is that I don’t like getting interrupted when I am seriously into something.

Another one of my weaknesses is that I trust people very easily.

As I already said, I am a very patient person, so I am actively working on this lacuna.”

Possible Answer #2:
“I am impatient which is the reason why I am a quick learner.

But I honestly believe that being impatient is a real weakness.

I expect my team members to prove themselves and start delivering on the very first assignment.

In case a particular resource fails, I have a tendency to stop delegating work to them and pick up projects on my own.

I am working on this attitude and in my previous organizations, my peers helped me cope up with this to a great extent.

To compensate for my own weakness, I prep my people about my exact expectations.

Then I give them a complete scope of the assignment followed by various “checkpoint” dates, where they can update me about their progress, with a demo/presentation if applicable.

In my previous job as a Project Manager, I was handling a 15-member team of both individual contributors and business managers like lawyers, Web Designers, Graphic Designers, SEO/SEM Consultants, Editors, Writers and Callers.

I used to break the entire task down into manageable chunks for each employee, followed by stringent timelines about when they would circle back to me.

This process worked brilliantly, helped me stay within the assigned budget and helped everyone achieve their individual targets, as they learnt.”

Tip: In your HR interview questions and answers round, avoid confusing answers such as this one. It might spark a war of words. Instead of this, you need to highlight a skill-set which you feel has scope for improvement. Remember to summarize what you have been doing to improve the same. The takeaway here is that your HR round interviewer is not interested to know about your weakness. Rather s/he is interested to see how well you handle the situation!

Possible Answer #3:
“I am a perfectionist and that is my main weakness, which I also think is my strength.”