But you can’t blame interviewers for asking it. Stories of failure can reveal important insights about an applicant’s maturity, resilience, temperament, openness to learning, and ability to receive critical feedback — qualities that won’t appear on a resume or cover letter and probably won’t be brought up by the applicant unsolicited.
No. Your screaming self-preservation instincts are correct. Sharing an embarrassing and consequential failure during a job interview could leave a lasting negative impression, but you still don’t want to seem evasive. So, where’s the safe zone between a revealing response and a repellant one? This can be tricky to navigate, so it’s important to practice in advance.
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“Fun” is not a word most would use to describe job interviews. Most of us find them to be stressful, anxiety-inducing events that can tend to bring out our insecurities and self-doubt.
Since we rarely know what’s going to happen during an interview, there’s a lot we can’t prepare for. We won’t know all of the questions they’re going to ask us or what exactly they’re looking for in a candidate. We won’t know how it’s going to go or whether we’ll get along well with our interviewer.
But there are some frequently used questions in interviews that we should always prepare beforehand, just in case we get asked those common questions.
One such commonly used question is some version of the, “When have you experienced failure, and how did you handle it?” question. A few other possible iterations of it are, “Tell me about a time when you failed,” “What has been your biggest failure?” and “What are your strategies for coping with failure?”
Our resumes and cover letters typically tell a potential employer about our accomplishments, our greatest strengths, and the talents that we could offer to a workplace. We showcase the best parts of ourselves and the things that we think would appeal to hiring managers.
The classic “failure” question gives employers the chance to find out something about us that is likely not mentioned in our applications: our shortcomings and mistakes. Discussing these aspects of ourselves — and how we have dealt with them — reveal our humanity, expose our level of self-awareness, and help employers understand how we deal with adversity and stumbles. We get a chance to show our humility, our grace during hard times, and our resiliency.
So, while this is often a dreaded question, we should try to see it as an opportunity to show who we are and why we’re worth having on a team.
These sort of questions are good at testing your problem-solving skills and assess how well aware are you of your strengths and weaknesses. To correctly answer the question, let’s go through some of the do’s and don’ts and sample answer question which describes the situation well.
You may be asked many challenging questions during your job interview. While it’s not always feasible to prepare for prompt answers, one question which is often asked by hiring managers is “what is your biggest failure“?
I have faced many hurdles in my career, and I personally feel that failures essentially change your personality. The most important loss of my life was at the start of my career. I joined the reputed media agency, and I was a part of ten team members. At that time, I was entirely new to the corporate culture. What I learned from my working environment was to be disciplined and hard-working. I was responsible for interacting with big clients and understanding the requirements. Being a fresher, I did not pay much attention to the details of the project. Instead, I focused only on my ethics and discipline. My poor listening skills led me to lose one of the most significant projects of the organization. It had a negative impact on my appraisal, and I realized where I lacked, I discussed the issue with my manager, and he helped me to teach how effectively can I handle projects. This project made me realize that, along with specific essential values, you need to keep your focus and attention on listening and communicating effectively.
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But you can’t blame interviewers for asking it. Stories of failure can reveal important insights about an applicant’s maturity, resilience, temperament, openness to learning, and ability to receive critical feedback — qualities that won’t appear on a resume or cover letter and probably won’t be brought up by the applicant unsolicited.
Does this mean you should respond with your most epic screw-up ever?
No. Your screaming self-preservation instincts are correct. Sharing an embarrassing and consequential failure during a job interview could leave a lasting negative impression, but you still don’t want to seem evasive. So, where’s the safe zone between a revealing response and a repellant one? This can be tricky to navigate, so it’s important to practice in advance.