How To Talk About Your Strengths and Weaknesses | Mock Interviews | How to Prepare for an Interview

As you prepare and practice your answers for a job interview, you’ll want to study great answers

and answers that aren’t so strong.

Here, we’ll see four people, a teacher, a doctor, a social worker, and a marketing expert, interview for a job.

We’ll take some standard interview questions and study how they answered them

to figure out how you can form your own compelling answers.

Today we’ll study two prompts:

describe one of your strengths, and, the opposite, describe one of your weaknesses.

We’ll see how talking about your weaknesses can still leave a very positive impression in an interview.

It’s common for employers to ask about your strengths in an interview.

Don’t just list a couple of things, this is your chance to let people know why they would want to hire you.

Come up with things that you’ve achieved at work that you’re proud of

and find your strengths that describe that.

Then, in the interview, when you’re talking about your strengths, tell that supporting detail.

Let’s compare different responses to the prompt: tell me about your strengths.

One of my strengths, I think, is I can look at something globally, from a perspective of far away.

And then think about those general goals, and then switch to being detail-oriented

and looking at what is the specific work that needs to be done in order to accomplish those more global goals?

That’s a good strength to have.

A lot of people can see the big picture but don’t do well with the details,

and then others can be very organized with details but lack the vision for bigger thinking.

So the fact that Lisa is strong in both is great.

But, her response would be even better if she could think of one bigger picture project that she worked on,

talk about it, and then talk about some of the details for it, how she figured out the steps and made that happen.

That’s something I’m more likely to remember.

Adrienne doesn’t go into a specific story about her strength, empathy,

but she ties it directly to how it benefits her in the workplace in two ways.

I think one of my greatest strengths is my ability to have empathy for others

and that's really effective within the workplace, with my colleagues, and trying to understand

people's priorities are so different,

and their feelings are so different, and we all have different things that we're coming to.

And so for me to understand

other people's priorities and be able to collaborate with them to reach a compromise with

everybody's feelings is very effective.

And having empathy is also really useful in thinking about reaching customers as a marketer

that I want to understand the thoughts and feelings and concerns of my target audience

so we can message them and we can bring events for them that really align with

what they need and what makes their lives better.

Dan also gets specific with his strength, which he says is his ability to work in a team.

He talks about the kinds of teams and the kinds of environments he’s worked in in the past,

and then ties that into another strength, being a people person.

So one of my strongest strengths is that I'm a team player.

I have been, worked on many clinical teams in the past,

with doctors, nurses, social workers, in some high intensity environments like emergency rooms,

mobile crisis teams, inpatient psychiatric facilities,

and I've always been able to work well on an interdisciplinary team.

I value being on the team with other people.

I value working with folks that have different skill sets than I do,

and I get a lot of energy from working with other people.

I think one of my greatest skills is being a people person, and being able to work with other people

towards a common goal.

As you think about your strengths,

make sure you’re able to talk specifically about how those come into play in the workplace.

If possible, have a specific example from your past

when one of these great qualities about you helped you get something done at work.

This brings me to an important point: timing.

You might be able to come up with a list of ten strengths.

Talking about those in detail would take way too long.

All the answers we just studied were 30 to 45 seconds.

Aim for somewhere in there.

Shorter than 30 seconds would be too brief—

if you can answer that quickly, you’re probably not giving the kind of detail that an employer wants to hear.

If you’re getting much longer than that, two minutes, more, then it’s too long.

You want to give good, meaty answers, but you also want to give the person interviewing you a chance

to chime in with follow-up questions.

Just as employers are interested in your strengths and how you talk about them,

they’re also likely to be interested in the opposite, your weaknesses.

They may use this word, or they may talk about ‘your areas for growth’.

Let’s listen to how Jeff answers this question.

I would say one of the weaknesses that I have,

which is a kind of a counterpart to being able to envision a future state, maybe several steps down the road,

is that it's harder sometimes for me to see the tiny specific steps that you need in order to reach that goal.

So sometimes I tend to jump

to the end product before realizing that there's a lot of tiny pieces that have to go into place

in order to reach that end product, and that sometimes has gotten me into trouble.

He gives a specific weakness, and this is in contrast to his strength,

where he does have great vision for projects.

But then he stops there.

Now, we’ve talked a lot about going into detail on answers,

and I wouldn’t necessarily suggest that you come up with great stories about

how your weaknesses have made things go poorly at work,

but I would suggest that you spend some time thinking about concrete things you've done

or could do to help you manage the weaknesses and improve.

Listen to how Lisa answers the question.

So one of my challenges is that I get very excited about projects and then I want to do them in great detail,

or I'll get excited about another project too, and I'll start that and suddenly, I'll have multiple projects going

and I'll be trying to do too much with them.

So I think my challenge is to keep it simple.

And I need to learn to put some things on hold,

and a good idea might be to keep a notebook where I keep some of those ideas sort of simmering,

but I don't jump into them until I finished some of my other things.

She changed the word ‘weakness’ and used ‘challenge’ instead.

That’s not a bad idea, it can have the same meaning but

'challenge' might have a bit more of a positive feeling around it.

She names a weakness and then gives a concrete example of how she might manage it:

keep a notebook of her ideas so she doesn’t feel like she has to dive into all of them right away.

Let’s hear how Adrienne describes her area for growth.

At this point in my career, I think the biggest area for growth is gaining experience.

Managing a larger team of people.

My experience up to this point has been managing one to two people directly,

but also managing a handful of other people indirectly

on projects because I really take ownership of projects that I'm working on,

whether I'm directly managing people or not,

but I'm really looking forward to an opportunity in my next career step

to directly manage a team of five to eight people.

She frames her weakness as a lack of direct experience in something she wishes to do.

I like how she talks about how she has only directly managed one to two people,

but she mentions that she has indirectly managed larger groups on certain projects

because she takes ownership of them.

This makes me feel like she’s a leader and that she takes a lot of initiative in the workplace.

She also gets really specific at the end, that she would like to manage a team of 5-8 people.

This may have been something she pulled right off of the job description for the job she’s interviewing for.

And this is a great idea.

As you study the job description, there might be a role you’ll play at this new job that's outside your experience.

An employer might be looking for someone who already has that experience.

But Adrienne addressed this concern that I might have

about a lack of experience by letting me know that she has actually unofficially managed larger teams of people

at previous jobs.

And by hearing her say this is what she wants to do as the next step in her career,

I can know it's something she’s thought about and that it's something she feels ready for.

You can think of your weaknesses or areas for growth in two ways.

First, your personality.

Jeff isn’t a detail person,

and Lisa gets too excited about ideas to the point where she has too many projects going on

to finish them all effectively.

Listing a weakness like this can be a great sign of self-awareness.

Make sure you always follow it up with what you’re actively doing to manage that weakness,

like Lisa’s notebook idea, or using an app to set up reminders for yourself

so all the small parts of a bigger project get done on time.

The second way you can talk about your weakness or area for growth

can be in reference to the job description.

Perhaps there is a part of the job that you’re less qualified for.

Finding a clever way to talk about how you want to grow and believe you can grow in that experience,

like Adrienne did, can be a wonderful way to answer this prompt.

In the next video, we’ll pull different common questions from these mock interviews

to examine effective answers, including, tell me why you’re the right person for this job.

It can be tough to figure out the best way to answer this question,

but we’ll make sure you can answer convincingly and with confidence.

For my non-native students, we’re going to get to your English lesson in just a minute.

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I make new videos on the English language and American culture every Tuesday

and have over 600 videos on my channel to date

focusing on listening comprehension and accent reduction.

While you’re waiting for next week’s video, a great next step would be to check out this “get started playlist.”

Now the English lesson.

Let’s talk for a minute about the pronunciation of two tricky words: strength and strengths.

Strength begins with the STR consonant cluster, and this can be pronounced two ways.

You might hear it with a clear T, st, st, st, strength, or you might hear it where the T sounds like a CH, sch, sch,

strength, strength.

Either pronunciation is okay.

It’s common to make the T a CH sound when it’s followed by R.

Then we have the EH vowel, stre-- streng-- and the NG consonant.

The back of the tongue lifts and touches the soft palate for NG.

Streng--

Sometimes NG also makes a hard G sound, like in Eng-gg-glish, English, but that doesn’t happen here.

There is no G sound.

Streng, strength.

And finally, the unvoiced TH at the end.

The tongue tip must come through the teeth for this.

Strength. Strength.

Let air flow lightly.

Strength.

What about when we add an S?

Strengths?

Most people in most situations don’t take the time to bring the tongue tip through the teeth for the TH.

The TH is much less obvious here than when the word is singular.

As I study various native speakers saying ‘strengths,’

it actually sounds like some of them drop the TH completely.

Then it ends up sounding like a K sound, strenks, strenks.

Strengths and weaknesses.

So in an interview, you could take this shortcut on this tricky word, and say:

One of my greatest strengths is.

Strengths or strength.

Th--- with a very, very quick TH sounds.

With a little practice, you won’t stumble on these words in an interview.

Break them down and practice them slowly.

Strengths, strength.

That’s it, and thanks so much for using Rachel’s English.