Interview Tip #3: Turn weakness into your accountability story

Many people I’ve prepared for interviews have asked, “How do I talk about my greatest weakness?” First, ditch the tired approach of presenting a strength disguised as a weakness. Instead, share an Accountability Story.

An accountability story takes an honest approach to weakness by candidly admitting a time when you messed up on the job. Your accountability story shares how you took ownership for your mistake, what you learned from it, and how you grew professionally.

Questions such as, “Tell me about a time when you failed,” seek real responses. As a hiring manager, I want to know how you take accountability for your mistakes. Do you try to hide them? Do you immediately elevate the problem to your boss?

Everyone will fail and make mistakes at some point in their careers. What matters is how you rebound and grow from those mistakes. That’s what an interviewer wants to discover when they ask about your weaknesses and failures. When you reframe failures as accountability stories, you demonstrate a growth mindset. You show how you learned and grew from the challenging experience.

Perhaps you put new procedures in place to prevent a mistake from recurring again. Perhaps you sought out training to strengthen an area of weakness. Whatever you share will give your interviewer a glimpse and roadmap into how you’ll handle future challenges.

The power of accountability stories is that these stories turn a negative into a positive. They give you a chance to showcase relevant strengths—such as creative problem-solving, information-gathering, and professional development. They are the difference between claiming you were successful and explaining what you really learned from the experience.