The weakness question represents the most common and most stressful one posed during interviews.

Yet in today's weak job market, the wrong answer weakens your chances of winning employment.When you're asked what your greatest weakness is, try
to turn a negative into a positive. For example, a sense of urgency to get projects completed or wanting to triple-check every item in a spreadsheet can be turned into a strength i.e. you are a candidate who will make sure that the project is done on time and your work will be close to perfect. The the term "weakness" isn't used in most response sample answers - you always want to focus on the positive when interviewing.

Most interview guides will tell you to answer it with a positive trait disguised as a weakness. For example, "I tend to expect others to work as hard as I do," or "I'm a bit of a perfectionist." Interviewers have heard these "canned" answers over and over again. To stand out, be more original and state a true weakness, but then emphasize what you've done to overcome it. For example: "I've had trouble delegating duties to others because I felt I could do things better myself. This has sometimes backfired because I'd end up with more than I could handle and the quality of my work would suffer. But I've taken courses in time management and learned effective delegation techniques, and I feel I've overcome this weakness."
The Pygmalion effect, or Rosenthal effect, refers to the phenomenon in which the greater the expectation placed upon people, often children or students and employees, the better they perform. The effect is named after Pygmalion, a Cypriot sculptor in a narrative by Ovid in Greek mythology, who fell in love with a female statue he had carved out of ivory after it became human from his wishes. The Pygmalion effect is a form of self-fulfilling prophecy, and, in this respect, people will internalize their negative label, and those with positive labels succeed accordingly. Within sociology, the effect is often cited with regard to education and social class. The golem effect has very similar underlying principles to its theoretical counterpart, the Pygmalion effect. Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobsons Pygmalion in the Classroom and further experiments have shown that expectations of supervisors or teachers have an impact on the performance of their subordinates or students. The most thoroughly studied situations of this effect are

classrooms.[2][3][4] When arbitrarily informed that a particular student is bright or dull, not only will the supervisors behavior change to favor the bright students (as indicated by more praise or attention), the students themselves will exhibit behaviors in line with their labels (such as the bright students leaning more forward in their chairs relative to the dull students).[5] While the Pygmalion effect and the majority of studies focus on the positive side of this phenomenon, the Golem effect is the negative corollary. Supervisors with negative expectations will produce behaviors that negatively impact the performance of their subordinates while the subordinates themselves produce negative behaviors.[1] This mechanism is an example of a self-fulfilling prophecy: the idea that self-held beliefs can come true in reality. When both supervisor and subordinate notice the low performance, the negative expectations are confirmed and the belief is reinforced. Job seekers need to remember that your perception is your reality when it comes to the interview process. Many of them may have had some job interviews already and others may not have had quite as much opportunity to experience that part of the hiring process. People learn how to perceive things as they grow up by what they see, experience and hear. For instance, a persons experiences and how they deal with them will all have an impact on that persons individual perception. In the world of employment, there will be many opportunities and different ways to perceive a particular situation. Quite often, how a candidate perceives a situation can be completely different from how a recruiter sees them and how they answer the interview questions. Dont let your become of one of those unprepared candidates. You cannot afford to risk having a poor interview performance in this tough economic climate and job market.