What is your greatest weakness as a banking professional?
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 explain the plan you've put into place to work on it. Just make sure that the weakness isn't a core competency of the Standard Bank 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 that is 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 introverted and therefore 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, and 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 the work I do and often struggle to delegate tasks to other members of my team. Even though I trust my coworkers and know what fantastic work they do, I've gotten in 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 I need it. While this weakness is still a work in progress for me, I've learned how important it is to communicate effectively with and rely on my team."
Unlock all 34 Standard Bank questions
Master questions that Standard Bank interviewers use to assess banking expertise.
Get Started