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What Was Your Biggest Failure This Year?

12/31/2018

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Does that seem like an abrasive, if not invasive question? Why would anyone have the nerve to ask that, let alone expect you to answer it? And yet, in a job-interview setting, it happens. And when it does, it might not even be confined to “this year.” (That was just the title I chose for this post, given its timing.) Interviewers might ask about the “biggest failure in your career.​”
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We all know the question “Tell me about a time xyz happened. How did you handle it?” That is an interview staple by now. Taken to the extreme, the question can be one specifically about a bad outcome. We all know how it feels to be in that place. To say it doesn’t feel good would still be bragging. At the very least, it feels like being stuck at the bottom of the staircase of the Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown, Mass. (Yes, you recognized that correctly in the photo.)

And now, with that one interviewer question, the floodgates open to release all that negativity into the conversation! Or do they?

There is no reason to start hyperventilating. As I said in an earlier blog post, there are the interviewers’ words, and then there is what they are really asking.

You don’t have to take up the interviewer on his or her specific wording. Not only do you not have to, in this case I caution against it. If you start out by saying “My biggest failure was…,” the very way it is worded implies there are two or more instances failure also happened, almost as big as that “biggest” failure. There is a substantial risk the interviewer will probe for those.

Therefore, you might want to rephrase the beginning of your answer to go something like:

“Well, there was that time things didn’t go as planned at all.”

Anyone can relate to that. You can do without using the word “failure” and still acknowledge the reality of failure. Saying things “didn’t go as planned” doesn’t suggest as much that the failure was brought about by you personally, and shifts the focus from your person to what happened.

Interviewers really want to know how you emerged from that time of failure. I can’t think of one successful professional who can truthfully say he or she has never failed. Interviewers worth their salt know that. They know the path to real success is never without setbacks and miscarriages.

So, rather than being blindsided by this question, come prepared to transform it into a story of learning and growth. Interviewers will see you as all the more experienced and resourceful for that, with the capacity for solutions for the problems of the future. On that note: Happy New Year!
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    All blog posts are original articles by Wolfgang Koch.

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