What is your greatest weakness?
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. Just make sure the weakness isn't a core competency of the Fannie Mae job description. If it's an analyst role, revealing 'logical reasoning skills' as a weakness likely won't get you far. Reflect on traits you want to work on, but that won't affect overall job success.
Honesty and self-awareness are key for this question. Interviewers have heard it all and will see through phony attempts to present a trait as a weakness when it's not a weakness.
"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 on the more introverted side and struggle to put myself out there, especially when talking to people in positions of authority. So I have been working on feeling more confident when I pitch ideas in these meetings. This has been my primary area of focus for improvement in the last few months, and one of my colleagues even recently commented that he had noticed a difference in the frequency of my contributions."
