Examples of weaknesses in a resume. Weaknesses in a resume: should they be indicated and how best to present them

Not everyone requires you to list your weaknesses on your resume. But if there is such a clause on the form, then putting a dash through would be a mistake. Better look at an example of character weaknesses in your resume.

Before filling out the box in which you need to indicate your shortcomings, think about your answer. Do not miss it under any circumstances, because ideal people do not exist. As a rule, managers want to see how adequately you evaluate yourself. If you don't know what to write, look at the suggested options and choose something that suits you best.

A universal formula: select character traits that are an advantage for performing this particular job, but in ordinary life can really be considered a human flaw.

The following weaknesses can be written:

• excessive directness, the habit of telling the truth face to face;
• difficulty establishing contact with strangers;
• inability to show flexibility in labor matters;
• reliability;
• increased anxiety;
• excessive emotionality, hot temper;
• love of formalism;
• restlessness;
• slowness;
• hyperactivity;
• fear of air travel.

All of the weaknesses listed in your resume can become strengths if you look at them from a different angle. An example is restlessness. For a sales representative or active sales manager, this can even be a plus. The same goes for reliability. This is a signal to the manager that you may be the person who will do all the overtime work.

All applicants should think about how to write my weaknesses for a resume. For example, a future accountant or design engineer might write:

• distrust;
• excessive scrupulousness;
• increased anxiety;
• excessive demands on oneself;
• straightforwardness;
• pedantry;
• modesty;
• inability to lie;
• difficulties in establishing contact with strangers;
• self-esteem;
• lack of flexibility in labor matters;
• integrity;
• inflated sense of responsibility;
• lack of diplomacy.

• hyperactivity;
• self-confidence;
• restlessness;
• impulsiveness;
• the need for external motivation;
• distrust, desire to double-check and confirm all information.

Disadvantages for one profession can become advantages for another.

You can also indicate in your resume among your negative qualities:

• straightforwardness;
• workaholism;
• excessive love of communication.

Applicants for the position of manager must prepare before filling out this column. It is better to think in advance about what weaknesses to include in your resume. You can write to them about the following character traits:

• excessive emotionality;
• pedantry;
• love for little things;
• thoughts about work and planning occupy most of your free time;
• increased demands on others.

A good example would be the following:

• inability to respond to rudeness with rudeness;
• tendency to make decisions based on one’s own opinion;
• distrust of people and love of confirmation of facts.

Some applicants prefer to indicate that they:

• overly trusting;
• can raise their voice to subordinates;
• straightforward, express their opinions without veiled embellishments;
• hot-tempered;
• always looking for confirmation of words;
• have a hypertrophied sense of responsibility;
• prone to formalism and pay excessive attention to detail;
• irritated by clutter;
• slow;
• do not like to do something to please others.

Many are afraid to write about shortcomings, believing that the employer will immediately send their resume to trash can. Of course, you shouldn’t be too frank, but you shouldn’t completely skip this section of the questionnaire. In this case, you can write about some neutral qualities that will not affect your work in any way. For a person applying for any vacancy, among the inherent weaknesses one can indicate:

• fear of airplanes;
• arachnophobia (fear of spiders), vespertiliophobia (fear bats), ophidiophobia (fear of snakes);
• excess weight;
• lack of experience;
• age (suitable for people over 40 years old);
• love of shopping;
• love for sweets.

This information does not characterize you in any way, it simply speaks about your fears or small weaknesses.

The following disadvantages can be mentioned:

• I don’t always express my thoughts accurately;
• I trust people too much;
• prone to reflection;
• I often analyze past mistakes, focusing too much attention on them;
• I spend a lot of time evaluating my actions.

These are negative qualities, but they should not affect the work process.

Regardless of the position for which you are applying, you can write the following weaknesses in your resume:

• I get so carried away with work that I forget to take breaks;
• I can’t build relationships with colleagues because I don’t like gossip;
• I can’t fight back in response to boorish treatment;
• I constantly pass all situations through myself;
• I let people get too close;
• I don’t know how to swear;
• I get noticeably worried when I have to lie.

Please note that there are items that are best left unindicated. You should not write, for example, that you:

• love to be lazy;
• afraid to take responsibility;
• don't like making decisions;
• unpunctual;
• are often distracted;
• you only think about your salary;
• love office romances.

For example, if you write about your laziness in your resume, you run the risk that the employer will decide that you don’t want to work.

A good, well-written resume is a powerful argument in favor of hiring. It can be a serious advantage, so you should start your job search by drawing it up. In the West, careerists keep their resumes throughout their lives, and add new lines as they improve their qualifications or change jobs. A document providing information about the applicant before the interview is part of business etiquette, which should not be neglected.

What you can and should write about yourself in your resume

There are basic points that must be spelled out. Please indicate strengths in your resume, avoid unnecessary things, only be informative. A resume is a brief summary of skills and qualities. From the first lines, show that you are a person with a serious character, focused on results. So what you need:

1. Personal information: full name, date of birth, Family status. If desired, you can add a photo.
2. Contacts. Please provide your phone number and address Email at the beginning of the resume. This will make it easier for them to find you when they want to contact you.
3. Desired vacancy. This item must be filled out.
4. Education. Indicate all institutions, courses, trainings that you have completed. School, university, attended a seminar on NLP - your knowledge base should be impressive. Be prepared to document each point.
5. Experience. Have you already held a similar position? Put this on your resume. To a person who does not have a single entry in work book, will be treated with suspicion.
6. Additional Information. Here you can talk about your hobbies, strengths and weaknesses. Carefully select personal qualities for your resume. It will be a plus if they prove useful in the position.

Professional skills and abilities

Describe yourself in your resume: Show the employer that you are qualified for the position. Possession computer programs, knowledge of languages, availability of a driver’s license - all this must be described in this paragraph. Place resume skills and abilities in order of importance for future work. If you have a specific, not-so-useful talent that you want to list, put it at the end of the list.

Personal qualities of a person

Education and experience are not the only evaluation criteria. Personal qualities for writing a good resume, although not mandatory, can play a role in many situations. decisive role. Imagine what kind of employee the director of the company wants to see? Do you have anything in common with him? positive traits, can you look competitive? Be sure to write about it, use your advantages!

Character strengths and weaknesses

Correctly selected good and bad personal qualities for a resume will help you get a job. If you cope with your responsibilities, character weaknesses will not be so important. Often the same trait becomes a trump card or interferes with work. Present your shortcomings as advantages in your resume and show your willingness to work on yourself. Determination is strong point character, which is valued in the team.

What weaknesses can be indicated in a resume?

The employee’s task is not to scare you away, but to show that you do not suffer from inflated self-esteem. Be honest, but strongly negative personal qualities are inappropriate for a resume and should not be included. The second column of the table will scare away the employer. Character traits from the third will play a positive role for certain positions. Don't be cunning and don't try to present advantages as disadvantages. This will be conspicuous and reveal insincerity.

Examples: individualism is good for a creative profession; it helps presenters or artists stand out from the crowd. When working in a team, on the contrary, you need to be able to become part of the team and take into account the opinions of others. A pedantic character will interfere with working quickly, but it is appropriate where quality comes first. Modesty will prevent you from communicating freely with clients, however, with the right approach, it will show the company in a good light.

You can be an incredibly cool specialist and even a guru in some narrow field, but what is the use of this if the personal qualities for the resume were chosen incorrectly or were completely forgotten about? It would seem: they should look at work experience, and the employee’s business qualities for a resume are of secondary importance. In fact, how you present yourself in the “personal qualities” column can become fateful.

Before we look at needed by the employer qualities, a little advice: forget about the words “commitment”, “fast learner”, “work for results” in the templates. This is all great, but so old. Even if you want to write about such qualities, let them not be the only ones on the list of honor. Your characterization as a future employee will definitely not benefit from the scarcity and stereotyped presentation.

Let's start with general advice from professional HR specialists. In order not to waste their precious time on an interview with the wrong person or the wrong person, they will definitely pay attention not only to work experience, but also to personal qualities. And here’s what the HR people themselves advise:

• You can value yourself very much as a specialist, but you don’t need to indicate more than 5 personal qualities
• The qualities of an employee for a resume are indicated based on the position. We will write more about this later. But, for starters: an employee of a food warehouse will not need charisma when performing his direct job duties.
• You can use humor, but only if you are not pretending to leadership position. The employer's preferences can most often be found out in advance in the job description.

Positive qualities of a person for a resume must match job responsibilities. That is why we have prepared a list of positions and personal characteristics for them.

Examples of business qualities for workers by specialty

Example #1: accountant. A lot depends on this person. Sometimes, even the life of the company depends on him and his ability to manage money correctly.

Strong professional quality accountants, which are important to indicate: stress resistance, perseverance, learning ability, loyalty, responsibility, non-conflict. And it’s not for nothing that we put stress resistance in first place. Conduct monetary transactions companies with a million-dollar turnover - why not be stressed? If the turnover is lower, the nerves are intact and the sleep is stronger.

Example No. 2: sales manager. The more he can sell, the better. The more new clients it attracts, the more confidently the company will develop. Yes, the life of the company largely depends on the sales manager. True, representatives of this position are not always rewarded with decent wages. But we will only talk about the good, and only about professional managers in sales, for whom it is important to indicate the following qualities of an employee for a resume:

Sociability, stress resistance, presentable appearance, competently delivered speech, learning ability, responsibility. In the case of the sales manager, we put communication skills first. True, after all, what kind of sales can there be if the manager does not know how to start a conversation, and even more so, “lead” the conversation with potential client to the desired result for the company?

Example #3: Secretary. For some reason, there is a stereotyped opinion that a secretary is an exclusively attractive person. And she is included, but many complex routine tasks fall on the shoulders of the secretary, depending on the needs of the company.

Personal qualities in a resume for a secretary: competent speech, attractive appearance, diligence, responsibility, perseverance, ability to work in a team, non-conflict. And here is the destruction of the template: primacy goes to “competent speech.”

Secretaries must be able to win over every visitor, be it an applicant for some position in the company or a potential business partner. The secretary is the first to create a general impression of the company. Have you ever met secretaries who couldn’t say two words? If you have met, you understand exactly why competent speech is so important.

Here we “went through” some of the most common vacancies that appear on the Internet every day in the amount of several dozen and even hundreds.

Why not pay special attention to IT specialists?

The professional skills of IT specialists are especially valuable today. Many companies are in need of incredibly cool specialists who can catch up and surpass their competitors, while increasing the company’s income several times.

Here's what IT specialists most often write about themselves in their resumes:

• Analytic mind
• Hard work
• Skill to work in team
• Ability to work with large amounts of information

Hard work, it seems to us, is approximately the same pattern as “determination” with “the ability to work for results. They don't want to see hard work potential employers in the column of personal qualities of your future IT specialist. Do you want to know what they want to see?

Here's what:

• Independence
• Initiative
• Stress resistance
• Energy
• Responsibility
• Skill to work in team
• Attentiveness
• Mobility
• Creativity

This is the track record.

Business qualities, as you can see, have absolutely no importance for an IT specialist’s resume. In the first positions: independence and initiative.

True, what employer wants to get an IT specialist into their team, who will have to be constantly monitored or adjusted and reminded of something? Moreover, the IT sector is one of the few where narrow specialization does not allow management to influence the results in any way.

So it turns out that an IT specialist must be independent, proactive (where would we be without this), creative, etc. Resistance to stress is a plus for the karma of not only the IT specialist himself, but also the entire company. Without stressful situations in this work it is rare to get by, and deadlines cannot be missed, it is undesirable to show one’s emotions and losing a client is like the collapse of one’s own and corporate reputation.

Here is a list of qualities that IT specialists list least often in their resumes:

• Charm
• Bravery
• Eloquence
• Forethought
• Strength of character
• Skepticism

It seems to us that most of this list are very important personal characteristics for a resume. Especially if you want to join a creative team. Why not indicate bravery and charm? When communicating with clients and employees, these qualities will not be superfluous. True, everything should be in moderation.

Universal positive qualities for any resume

And finally, about the universal qualities that HR specialists recommend indicating in your resume without reference to the position and its requirements:

• Fast learner
• Honesty
• Initiative
• Stress resistance
• Absence bad habits

This is a small but universal set. You can take note of it, but do not forget to indicate those personal qualities that the future employer expects from you.

And it’s very simple to write what you need: put yourself in the shoes of this employer. Think about what kind of specialist you would like to see on your team? The right employee qualities for a resume are not templates. You want people to pay attention to you, right? Then pay special attention to the “personal qualities” column, and the position will be yours, we are sure.

The recruiter makes the first opinion about the applicant, and, as you know, the second chance to produce good first there will be no impression. Therefore, the point about character weaknesses often confuses the candidate.

Do I need to indicate my shortcomings in a custom resume? There is no definite answer to this question, but for most vacancies this is not necessary and will not be a significant disadvantage when considering your response. However, if such a question is in the questionnaire, then ignoring it would be a big mistake.

If you are filling out a resume on a job search site and there is this item, you should not skip it. You can limit yourself to writing the standard 2-3 characteristics and move on to the next point. But if you really want to make an impression, it's better to be thorough in filling out every item on your resume. If in a dialogue we can paraphrase a phrase, focusing on the behavior of the HR manager, then in a resume every sentence should speak only in your favor.

By including a question about weaknesses in the questionnaire, the employer certainly does not expect your absolute honesty. Rather, he wants to test the candidate’s ability to answer complex questions, not ignore the manager’s instructions, simply his adequacy. After all, if a person has nothing to tell about himself, then is he such a good worker and is it worth wasting time on an interview.

What answers should you avoid?

So how to answer tricky question about your shortcomings? First, let's look at what is better not to write:

1. You should not put a dash or completely ignore this item. For a recruiter, such an act is a signal of the candidate’s inattention, lack of desire to carry out complex or unpleasant instructions from his superiors, and inability to correctly evaluate himself.
2. Write a list of 10 or more shortcomings. For most companies, it is enough to indicate 2-3 qualities.
3. Describe those aspects of character that can really interfere with the chosen job. For example, laziness, conflict, unpunctuality, etc. will definitely not brighten your appearance in the eyes of your future boss.
4. Lie outright. Even if the quality you specified in the point about weaknesses will be perceived positively when evaluating the questionnaire, but in reality you do not possess it, the truth will quickly become clear and there will definitely not be any praise for deception.

17 Jan 2018 Recruiters often ask candidates to list their weaknesses. The purpose of this question is for the HR specialist to understand how self-critical the potential employee is, whether he evaluates himself correctly and whether he is able to perceive criticism. The applicant can independently indicate his negative sides in your resume, however, do not forget to emphasize your skills and abilities. In this article we will tell you how to correctly present your negative qualities in your resume and give illustrative examples, But first things first. First, consider the basic rules for filling out the section on shortcomings.
If an employer sends you an email or asks you to fill out a resume form from the company before a meeting, then most likely there will be a question about your weaknesses. Under no circumstances should you put a dash. If this section is present in the application form, then the employer is definitely interested in this item. Dash in in this case will be regarded as an inability to soberly evaluate oneself and inflated self-esteem. Also, do not get too carried away when filling out this section. Remember that disadvantages can become your advantages. For example, being unsociable for an accountant is undoubtedly a plus. But for a sales manager it is obviously a minus. Remember that your adequacy, self-criticism and truthfulness are being assessed, and not how many shortcomings you have. Examples of undesirable personal qualities in a resume - shortcomings that are definitely not worth mentioning I am often late; I am fond of gambling; I have bad habits (alcohol, smoking, etc.); I am often distracted; I work only for the sake of a salary; I like to have office romances; I am lazy; I am greedy; I am quick-tempered; Passive; I am envious; I am careless; I often feel indifference to what is happening around me, I love living in my own world. Disadvantages that may not work in your favor: Pedantry; Individualism; Self-criticism; Self-esteem; Hyper-reactivity; Modesty; Mistrust; Conceit; Straightforwardness; Vanity; Self-confidence; Excessive exactingness; Painstaking. Before pointing out certain shortcomings, read the requirements in the vacancy and draw up an approximate portrait of an ideal employee. After that, highlight character traits that will not hinder you or will help you in your future work. Good weaknesses for a resume: Inability to respond to rudeness with rudeness; Increased demands on others; Tendency to make decisions based on one’s own opinion; Reluctance to act to please others; I can’t always accurately express my thoughts; Prone to reflection; I trust people, sometimes too much; I spend a lot of time assessing of my actions and actions; I can get carried away with work and forget about a break; I let all situations pass through me; I don’t know how to swear; I don’t know how to lie. Neutral qualities: Fear of insects, snakes, mice and other living creatures; Fear of airplanes; Lack of work experience (for those starting a career or changing field of activity); Age (for people over 40 years old); Love of shopping. List negative qualities a person’s resume should not contradict your type of activity or call into question your professionalism. So, for example, to get a job as a sales consultant, you can indicate: reliability (is a plus when working with clients); excessive scrupulousness (will be a plus when working with money); overpriced a sense of responsibility (as a rule, sellers are financially responsible for the product, and this “flaw” is simply necessary for a good salesperson; excessive love of communication ( important point in working with clients, which is also a positive “disadvantage” for retail.) Negative qualities for an accountant can be the following: Distrust of people and love of facts (or rather, numbers); Discharge from disorder (everything should be in its place and only so);Slowness (when working with large sums There’s definitely no point in rushing); Excessive attention to detail or pedantry.