How to Answer “Tell Me About a Time You Failed” in an Interview
While this isn’t the most common interview question, the question of failure – if you get one – is pretty confusing. How will you answer this question honestly, but at the same time not scare off your potential future employer, remembering the time when you made a bad deal and lost a lot of money to the company?
This post was originally published on the Muse website .
This is a difficult situation. You want to impress, but you are clearly being asked to talk about what you have failed at. So what are you doing?
Above all, stay calm. Take a deep breath and say something like, “Wow, that’s a great question. I’ll have to think about it for a second. ” Then think about it for a second and follow the next four steps.
1. Choose real failure
Step one is to choose failure. Don’t try to find a way out of this by saying that you once got an A in a college class. You are not deceiving anyone. At the same time, you probably also want to avoid any colossal setbacks associated with the job you are applying for. If the interviewer specifically asks for something work-related, try to at least draw a story from something that happened a long time ago. Pick a story in which something quite important went wrong due to your personal actions (or inaction).
Note that I said “something” and not “everything” – the reason people are so often wrong about this question is because they are looking for a situation in which everything went wrong. For your answer to work, you only need one thing to go wrong.
2. Define failure in your own words
The reason you don’t need to talk about some kind of big failure, where everything goes disastrously and ridiculously wrong, is because you’re going to explain why you thought the situation was unfortunate.
Once you’ve chosen your story, define failure so that it works for it. Once the failure is identified, your story should no longer be an obvious failure; it just has to be what you define failure. Here are some examples:
“For me, failure is not living up to expectations, both of others and mine.”
“As a manager, I consider it a failure whenever I am caught off guard. I try to know what’s going on with my team and their work. “
“I think failure is more than just failing to achieve a goal, it is not achieving a goal with the resources provided to you. If I end up spending more time or materials than I was originally allocated, it will be a failure for me. “
3. Tell your story
Now that you’ve decided on how you measure failure, tell the story you chose. Try not to spend too much time preparing the scene and get to the highlight quickly . Interviewers aren’t asking this question to see you squirm, they want to know how you deal with failure, so move on to the part where you deal with failure as quickly as possible.
Start with the situation and explain why it was difficult. Then go to what you specifically did to try and fix it. Presumably, because it is about failure, you will not succeed, or only partially succeed. This is fine. Don’t try to hide the fact that things didn’t go as planned. It’s impossible to do well in a job interview if the interviewer doesn’t believe in what you’re saying, so don’t try to sugarcoat things.
4. Share what you’ve learned
Finally, at the end of your answer, after you tell the terrible outcome of your story, you will move on to the good one. You want to take stock of the lessons learned.
Talk about why you think things went wrong, maybe what you would have done in hindsight, and, of course, what you will do in the future. It might sound something like this:
“Our big problem was the assumption that we could get clean data from users. This is one of the most important lessons I’ve learned from this experience: Never make assumptions about data. I never made that mistake again. “
“If I had just communicated the first few obstacles along the way, we could have met our customers’ expectations, but because we didn’t, we screwed up the relationship. Now I never let an inconvenient conversation stop me from communicating openly about the status of a project. “
The question of failure often catches people by surprise. Even if you’re ready for it, it’s hard to talk about failure. The key to answering this question correctly is to first formulate your assessment of failure and then end with key lessons from the experience. If you add these two components to your story, you will definitely get a convincing answer.