How To Tackle 'Tell Me About A Time You Failed' Question In A Job Interview

'Tell me about a time you failed.' Have you ever faced this question in a job interview? Many times interview panel makes use of situational or behavioral questions to understand the personality of the job seekers. Asking about your strengths and weaknesses, hobbies, and life goals are all intended for the same. But when it comes to discussing your failure story with the interview panel, you may be left short of words. In this article, we will teach you how to discuss your failures comfortably with your interviewer and still come out as a winner in your job interview.

Points to remember while responding to ‘Tell me about a time you failed’

• Be brief and precise: Whenever you are asked about your failures, you must be ready to share certain negative experiences that made you learn a lot. Your motive must be to express your thoughts concisely yet clearly. However, you must not stretch your answer beyond a limit. Your inability to express yourself concisely and effectively can cut down your chances of being hired.
• No excuses: 'Tell me about a time you failed' is one of the most common interview questions. Through this, the potential employer intends to know if the candidate believes in taking responsibility for his/her mistakes or finds means to make excuses and blame them on others. As a matter of fact, the hiring manager would never prefer the latter type. Hence, the key to convincing your potential employer that you are an accountable person is to refrain from blaming them on others. Every mistake has a positive outcome if viewed constructively and making excuses is never the right way to go about it.
• Keep your answer ready: You must have faced many unpleasant situations throughout your life. But when going for a job interview, you must be prepared with one or two incidents that you think would be relevant to be shared in front of the interview panel. For this, as part of your interview preparation, you must take out some time to list some incidents that you can state effectively.

Quick tip: Some failures are best kept to oneself because they might reflect a lack of abilities. Choosing something that highlights your strength, key qualities and positivity should be your focus rather than stating something that paints a negative picture of you.

• Practicing well: Practicing tricky or commonly asked interview questions beforehand can help you in several ways. It not only boosts your confidence but also makes your responses well-structured during the interview. You may take the help of your friends or family members to hold a mock interview for you as assessing yourself objectively can be difficult. Constructive criticism or honest feedback helps to realize your shortcomings and in shaping your answers well.

Three points to avoid when talking about your failures

1. Don’t try to hide your failures

A job candidate who projects himself/herself as perfect can come across as boastful or unrealistic to the interview panel. Hence, express your real failure effectively while highlighting your qualities.

2. Avoid stories that make you seem incompetent or unfit for the job

Taking the help of an example, if the job demands you to be proactive, narrating an incident where you lost an opportunity due to your laid-back attitude can prove unfavorable for you. Hence, you must refrain from stating such incidents. Sharing something that happened due to a human error or lack of experience can be a better option.

3. Avoid memorizing your answer

Even though you must have some rough work done before your real interview, you must refrain from giving a memorized answer. This will make you sound unnatural. Your answer must flow naturally and you must be ready to face any secondary interview question on the topic from the interview panel while maintaining good eye contact with the interviewer.

Using the STAR strategy for answering 'Tell me about a time you failed'

While the question 'tell me about a time your failed' seems general and open-ended, giving an appropriate response to this requires practice. It is not just about stating an incident but showing how you transformed your failure into a lesson that helped you improve yourself.

We all know our failures but it gets tricky when we have to speak about them, especially during a job interview. One way to tackle this 'tell me about a time you failed' is to use the STAR strategy. It helps you to organize your ideas and weave them into something meaningful. This helps to lay a good impression on the hiring manager.

STAR method stands for:

S: Situation T: Task A: Action R: Result

To go ahead with this strategy for framing your answer to 'tell me about a time you failed', you must follow these steps:

• Choose a situation and give some details about it.
• Explain the task that was assigned to you.
• Describe the action that went wrong and how you responded to it.
• Share the result or outcome of the situation explaining your learnings and the measures you took to fix your mistake.

The STAR strategy is quite helpful to tackle any tricky interview question during a job interview. It is important to note that during a job interview, more than taking your mistake into consideration, the interviewer wants to see your clarity of thought and your ability to handle difficult situations. Using the STAR method you can organize your thoughts into a well-structured story and easily cover all the relevant points that the interviewer is expecting from you.

Tips for nailing the 'tell me about a time you failed' question

While answering the above interview question, center yourself around minor failures that had no major effect on your personal and professional life. As stated above, refrain from sharing incidents involving aggression, violence, cheating, etc.

You must remember that the interviewer wishes to understand you as a professional and decide if you would be a good fit for the company. Hence, your motive should not be to show your perfection but to make yourself seem like a human being who does make common mistakes but also learns from them and takes steps towards becoming a better version of oneself.

How can you respond to 'tell me about a time you failed'- Useful examples

One of the safest answers you can give to this question can be your failure to crack a certain exam. Using an appropriate example, you can talk about your learnings, what lagged in your strategy and how you overcame your failure and successfully worked towards your professional growth.

Another answer could be some mistake you did while entering the information of your customer which led to his/her inconvenience. Here you can talk about how you handled the situation; the measures you took to rectify your mistake and the steps taken to ensure customer satisfaction.

All the above replies don't paint you in a negative light, but rather highlight your quality of self-awareness. If you want to use the STAR technique while answering to this interview question, here is how you can do it.

Situation: In my last company, I was managing an advertising team. Our job was to design budget-friendly advertising campaigns for clients.

Task: We once got in touch with a very big potential client. I was very eager to work with them and in order to lay the best impression on them, I drafted a proposal with unrealistically tight deadlines. As a result, the client happily offered us work.

Action: As the work started, I realized that the deadlines that I had given to the client were impractical.

Result: I apologized to the client and requested some more time to deliver the project. The incident taught me never to overpromise, but rather work on delivering quality within expected timelines. 

Summing up

Behavioral interview questions can be difficult to handle at times. But confidence and smart strategy can help you nail such types of questions. 

As discussed above, talking about your biggest failures honestly is the best thing you can do to lay a good impression on the interview panel. The hiring manager doesn’t want you to lie but be accountable for the mistake you might have committed in the past. Hence, taking responsibility for your failures is a good way to go about it. Also, you must be open to facing further questions about your failure from the interview panel. For this, you must be clear and not fumble while giving further explanations. Also, highlighting your qualities should be your prime motive. So, whether it is about your weaknesses or failures, you must find a way to underline your good qualities even while answering such questions. Last but not the least, end your answers on a positive note. This will certainly leave a good impression of you on the interview panel. 

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