What is your greatest weakness as a finance professional?

What You Need to Know
What to Avoid
1st Entry Level Example
1st Experienced Example
2nd Experienced Example

This common interview question is an opportunity to demonstrate self-insight. Give an honest answer with a real weakness you have been focusing on and what plan you've put into place to work on it. As they state in their core values, "We hold ourselves and each other to the highest standards of excellence." Honesty and self-awareness are the keys to this question.

Make sure the weakness you volunteer isn't a core competency of the BlackRock job description. If it's an analyst role, revealing 'logical reasoning skills' as a weakness won't get you far. Reflect on traits you want to work on but that won't get in the way of overall job success. Interviewers have heard it all and will see through phony attempts to present a strength as a weakness.

"My greatest weakness, according to my boss, is that I hold myself to an unrealistic standard. I am always trying to be the best and won't turn in my work until I have gone far above and beyond expectations. But sometimes, this results in coming too close to deadlines when turning in my work. So, I am constantly working on this and getting better at calculating such risks. I've also gotten better at evaluating what 'extras' I do are worth the time investment and energy expenditures put into them."

"I've been working on finding my voice when meeting with upper-level management. While I know the ideas I bring to the table are valuable, I've always been introverted and have been working on feeling more confident with pitching ideas in these meetings. This has been my primary area of focus for improvement in the last few months. One of my colleagues even recently commented that he had noticed a difference in the frequency of my contributions."

"I take a lot of pride in my work and often struggle to delegate tasks to my teammates. Even though I trust my coworkers and know what fantastic work they do, I've gotten into the habit of seeing tasks through from start to finish. I got to a point where this was no longer feasible with the new responsibilities I had taken on, so I've been working on feeling more comfortable asking for help from my colleagues when necessary. While this is still a work in progress, I've learned how important it is to communicate effectively with and rely on my team."