Interviews are nerve-racking to say the least, and that’s before you even get asked any questions. One of the most anxiety inducing questions is “Tell me about a time you failed”. Luckily, there are a few ways you can tackle this question and come out of the interview impressing the recruiter rather than scaring them off.
All of us have failed more than once in life, so your first step is to choose which failure to talk about. You want to pick one that is related to what you do professionally, personal failures are ok as well so long as you don’t go too in depth into any personal issues. It needs to be a failure of significant weight as well, something with consequences that had an impact. This sets the stage for developing your answer later on.
After you’ve decided on the incident you will be discussing, you want to explain what failure in this specific instance meant. You want to make sure your interviewer fully understands the context of your short-coming so that they can better interpret the story. By giving them a clear definition of the failure in question, you take away any risk of them misunderstanding.
Once you have made sure that the context around your story has been explained and the consequences understood, transition into how this failure helped you grow as a professional. Spin the story to turn your failure into a future success. Talk about how failing in this moment helped you to succeed in another or gave you the insight to improve your performance at work.
No one enjoys talking about a time when they weren’t at their best. However, if you can explain to your recruiter that you learned something from the incident and are a better worker now because of it, then you should have nothing to worry about. Failure is a valuable tool, and building from past failures is crucial to succeeding. It’s like Robert Kiyosaki once said:
“Failure is part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success.” – Robert T. Kiyosaki
-Tyler Geeve, Staff Source Marketing/Recruiting Assistant