(Who is Dana? Dana – Media Planner and Buyer with 4 years experience seeking Marketing PR Specialist role)
Terry: Again, we all have areas that are strong within us and areas that are not quite as strong. What would you say are your weaknesses?
Dana: I would say that I have a tendency to be, you know, overly sensitive or too sensitive. When it comes to constructive criticism, I tend to take that a little personally and I definitely think that’s an area that I can obviously make improvements on.
Once in a while, I tend to focus a little too much on the details of a project. So, it’s important for me to take a step back and make sure that I’m keeping the scope of the work at hand. It makes me keep my priorities straight and keep a positive mindset about the goal of the project.
Terry: What were the factors where your competencies were not a match for your prior job?
Dana: I would say it was very… I had come from a background that was a larger picture marketing project management and the public relations focus. And although I was doing media planning and buying at my previous job, it wasn’t as involved as this sort of role was. And so I didn’t feel like my skills that I had learned in my previous job really translated to what I would be doing at XXX.
So I would say it was just a difficult transition period. And it was a smaller company and therefore there wasn’t a whole lot of training, so I had to kind of learn as I went and it wasn’t sort of the environment that I was used to, you know?
Terry: In what regard?
Dana: In terms of training and when you would have a mentor, somebody to kind of guide you along. You were more on your own there and didn’t really have a whole lot of, you know, team sort of camaraderie. It wasn’t, you know, a professional environment.
Here’s how I would rate this answer . . .
Q5. What are your weaknesses? – DANA QUICK RATING – D
You don’t need to give them two, give them one, be prepared with another one if they ask for it, for each of the two, follow the suggested format and make sure you talk about what already doing and done and how that’s made a difference in how you operate now
FOR THE FOLLOWUP on what went wrong – your answer left me with doubts that you couldn’t function well in an environment when you had to figure it out yourself.
If we were small or busy that would worry me about you, because you would have the same problem with us not giving you formal training.
Suggest you refine your answer.
This Guide will help you with samples and complete how to answer training for even more questions you face in your job interviews.
