The Job Interview
“What are your strengths and weaknesses?”
This is a hackneyed question that appears on far too many job interviews, and it exemplifies the utter lack of nuance within the reasoning process to hire someone or not within most organizations.
To any interviewer that regularly uses this crude question in their hiring process, I’d love to ask some questions of my own:
Why are we using a loaded question that presumes that there are generalized strengths and weaknesses, as if we can only choose between being proud of some part of ourselves or ashamed about others?
Why are we so inclined to bifurcate our personality traits into strengths and weaknesses when clearly our psychology and our circumstances are infinitely more complex than two lazily defined categories?
Strengths and weaknesses in regard to what? In regard to our personal lives? Our happiness? Our personal definition of success? Our social relationships? Our previous job, which may have nothing to do with our success in a future one?
Do we measure it against each and every specific task we’ll be doing on the job, or are we measuring it against an oversimplified, crude narrative of what the job entails, because many interviewers or recruiters don’t actually understand or even care to understand the work itself?
Do we really expect someone to give an unbiased, honest breakdown of all their personality traits, when a “bad” answer would cost them a potential job offer?
How will we apply this question when we consider that most people lack the self-awareness, humility, and at least halfway-decent comprehension of human psychology that is required to do so?
And if someone is honest, let’s take a step back and ask ourselves: why are we probing someone’s ability to monologue coherently and confidently about their personality to a stranger?
Why should we hire someone based on these skills when it has absolutely nothing to do with most jobs?
Can we really be convinced that this question is such a great opportunity for people to talk about themselves in a fair and meaningful light?
Having hired dozens of people in my career as a manager, I can tell you first hand how little correlation there is between my impressions during the interview and that new hire’s performance on the job. We have to realize that most jobs are rather complex; while they do have their fair share of outright menial tasks, even seemingly basic jobs—cashiers, receptionists, stockers, janitors, servers— possess a variety of responsibilities that, in order to achieve excellence in that position, require one to independently utilize skills or qualities such as planning, multitasking, task prioritization, effective communication, composure under stress, problem-solving, and decision-making. When we want to make any work into an art—an endeavor that requires constant generosity and commitment—more often than not it isn’t absolute whether certain personality traits would be directly conducive toward someone’s individual ability to contribute within an organization.
We should adopt a more nuanced conception of ourselves where we don’t define strengths and weaknesses by the person, but by each trait. More specifically, how each trait potentially contributes or detracts from a specific goal. Only then can we understand how each trait creates a unique dynamic with other traits, and how this on its own has the potential to create yet another unique dynamic with either the work itself or with the people around them. We also have to accept the fact that there is no simple answer when it comes to human personality.
I’m with Seth Godin on this one. Instead of wasting all our time asking pointless, unnatural, and awkward questions and solely probing people’s ability to be confident in job interviews, just have people use that time to do a trial run of the job itself, which also gives them an opportunity to see if the work environment is a good fit for them before commuting to it. If it isn’t a good fit, neither party benefits.
Yes—it’s certainly costly to pay people to do these trial runs, to train and invest in knowledgeable and motivated recruiters to undertake this operation, but what’s even more costly than that is having dead weight in your organization—people that don’t actually contribute anything valuable. And what’s even more costly than that is staff turnover—all the costs of rehiring and retraining new employees, the productivity loss and disruption of business operations, and the cascading effects of declining organizational reputation among employees and customers alike.
The only purpose of this absurd question is to use it to provoke someone who would be repulsed or bewildered by such a blatantly dense conception of personality—someone who dares to challenge the convention and offer nuance in pursuit of truth even when it might undermine their own chances of getting the job. That’s someone that can be truly invaluable to any organization.
