[keyboardbarista]

In my experience they don't. They want to know if you're a reasonable, self-aware person who can communicate effectively.

Let's say you name a reasonable weakness that can easily be improved upon and that doesn't spell disaster for your ability to do your job. And let's say they reject you.

Either they're a terrible company to work for, or they have a huge mistake in their interview process. In the former case you don't want to work for a terrible company, so great, they just saved you years of pain. In the latter case, hey, mistakes happen. That's out of your control. Life is random sometimes. Besides, it's highly unlikely to be significant enough to tank your entire interview.

[detaro]

> Let's say you name a reasonable weakness that can easily be improved upon and that doesn't spell disaster for your ability to do your job.

To the recipient, that is equally likely the rehearsed answer, because from high school on your told to think of one to reply to that question that fits into what your interviewer probably thinks is reasonable.

And there's the entire thing where some people answering truthfully would tell the interviewer things the interviewer isn't legally allowed to ask about, which is always a lovely strategy for running an interview.

[keyboardbarista]

The stereotypical rehearsed answer is the Michael Scott one, where you dodge the question by actually naming a strength and pretending it's a weakness.

In my experience working at places full of smart, talented, ambitious people looking to fill a role with a similar caliber of person: don't do that.

[username90]

Most people knows that you should give a "real" but insignificant weakness just as you said you wanted in the previous post instead of non-weaknesses. If you don't think that people have practiced such answers and carefully picked their "weakness" then you are ignorant.