What are your greatest weaknesses.

"I'd say a clear growth opportunity for me is improving on monitoring how well my team leaders are developing their teams. I have a strong systems approach to my work, from strategy to tracking KPIs and ROIs. I am a strong coach as well. But sometimes it can be challenging knowing where to draw the line between trusting your team leaders to put into practice what I've taught them. I've realized that even though they've absorbed what I impart to them, there are always those who put those things into practice only when you're around, and revert to less desirable practices the rest of the time. Some habits simply need to be unlearned before others are picked up. And my team leaders know how to talk the talk and gain my trust. So, I have been working harder on keeping my finger on the pulse of our entry level staff. I realize not doing so is a lost opportunity, and I have made a lot of progress in this regard, but there is still some growth opportunity there. Recently I launched an employee survey twice a year, and this has helped tremendously in this regard."

"I think one area that I've struggled is in finding the right target audience. I'd previously prided myself on being a very empathic person and being able to walk around in someone else's shoes. But, I took the aggregate behavior too literally, and realized projecting this way was a mistake. An assumption like that peers into the market only through your lens, not exploring outside of your range of experience or beyond your common reference or scope. So, I've improved in this regard, examining and questioning the findings, and gotten better at exploring where, or to what target audience, those findings will lead me."

"I'd say one of my weaknesses as a product manager has been my pride. I have been very proud of my accomplishments and have spearheaded some very successful branding and marketing campaigns. But how proud I was of those accomplishments led to a degree of rigidity, and a slower response time to gather customer feedback, to examine how the product vision needed to be updated in order to remain relevant. This resulted in no longer leading the competition, and once in a rebranding effort. I've since learned from my mistakes, and put my all in anticipating what is around the bend. But it still feels like a struggle to let go of what I love about the branding we've done and adjust to the anticipated trends. My superiors have praised my growth in this regard, and have reiterated to me not to be so self critical, but I still feel I have a bit farther to go."

"Sometimes I have been known to ride out the success of a content marketing campaign for too long, resulting in lower engagement and a lack of relevance. So, I have been working on thinking several moves ahead, and on improving my timing on when to switch to the next campaign before the current one turns into wallpaper or loses its luster. So now, as I am developing the current campaign, through native advertising and targeted online ads, I am adding the finishing touches to the next campaign, and developing the next one. I've improved my timing significantly, but still feel as if it needs a bit more adjusting when scheduling it or adjusting based on its engagement and activity."

"One of the things I have struggled with is in finding unique ways to study and identify trends as a traditional marketer. It's trickier than online marketing to identify which metrics are relevant and which are wild herrings. But several years ago I started using a beat-yesterday-book, where I recorded everything from when our campaigns were launched, to when they were taken down. I put in rainy days, snow days, and every factor that could have had an impact on our efforts, positive or negative. Though I am still struggling with identifying which elemental factors are metrics worth studying, I've improved significantly and continue to identify and recognize new opportunities in this regard."

How you answer this question will inform your interviewer of your experience level as a marketer. Confidently discussing your weaknesses takes a certain degree of emotional intelligence. It reveals you take responsibility for your own actions, hold yourself accountable, and take charge of your professional development as a marketer. So, examine your career goals, identify your growth opportunities, and determine how the company or position you are interviewing for can help you grow and accomplish those goals. You want to come across as confident, while being unabashed and transparent about your growth opportunities.

Avoid offering any weaknesses which are core skills or requirements for the position you are interviewing for. Doing so will only serve as a red flag, framing you as an undesirable candidate. It will also showcase your inexperience, while missing the opportunity the question presents you.

Rather, frame your weakness as a strength. For example, if you are hyper focused on the details of analytics, maybe you sometimes get buried in the numbers, and have trouble breaking away from them. In this scenario, your attention to detail is a strength, as is your compulsion to go above and beyond.