Interview Question: What are your Weaknesses?

What are your weaknesses?

The best advice I’ve gotten regarding this questions is “be honest, and provide strategies to address the weakness”. I’ll need to use myself as an example here. I suck at proofreading copy in my work. I can do it, but –for some reason—I don’t.

I once sent a biz card to the printer with a half a phone number!! Unfortunately the client gave me a file with the different names, titles and contact information for the business cards and omitted the last 4 digits of one of the numbers. I looked past it; after obsessing about the myriad changes the client had already sent and FTPd the file with that glaring omission. Luckily my printer—a woman with a great eye for detail—caught it and emailed me before beginning the proof. My point is that I just didn’t look.

In interviews I answer the weakness question truthfully, “I need an editor.” That’s exactly how I phrase it. Then I of course follow up with a sentence or two on the importance of copy editors, and round it all out by stating that, “in recent projects I’ve become more aware of this challenge, so I build in time in my project schedule to allow for edits to copy or text revisions.”

The takeaway: be honest and follow up with an achievable solution.
Link to more Interview Questions for Graphic Designers.