Wednesday, March 02, 2016
How to Answer "Tell Me About a Time You Failed" in an Interview
lifehacker.com: While not the most common interview question, the failure question—should you get it—is rather perplexing. How do you answer this honestly while also not scaring away your potential future employer by bringing up that time you fat-fingered a trade and lost the company a lot of money?
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I love the failure question, mainly because I love telling stories but also because often times failure stories in particular have some sort of funny aspect to them along with their educational value. I really like the way this article outlines how to answer this interview question, as telling the truth, actually defining failure, and sharing what you learned from the experience really are the most important points in the response. I don’t think I’ve ever faltered on this question in particular but a question I often falter on is what my favorite whatever could be. I often never think about what my favorite book is and why, or movie, or play, or anything like that. So by the time I get into the interview and they pose that kind of question I just feel in genuine and don’t have a real answer as to why because that thing just isn’t really my favorite.
I've always been told to approach this question with a answer that focuses more on the "what I learned" part than anything else. While I still agree that that's important, reading this article made me realize how important the other parts of the story are too. I am especially interested by the idea of first defining what failure means to you to set it up for the context of the story. I was initially confused about why they specified between a complete failure and a situation in which one aspect failed, but after hearing the part about explaining the context it made sense. A story of faulture doesn't necessary have to be an end-of-the-world, employment horror story but rather an example of an issue you faced and didn't handle as well as you could have, whether it constituted an entire project or just part of one. That is a tactic I will definitely be bringing to my next interview.
This article is very helpful in that it actually offers solid advice. I think what's so hard about answering the failure question is making sure that your failure story doesn't scare the interviewers away, but it also can't be too trivial that it comes off as being pretentious/dodging the question. Some very useful advice I took away from this article is to define your own definition of failure. This is something not a lot of people mention when they are asked this question and definitely shows that you are very aware and mature in that you know what failure means to you and how you avoid it. I do think that defining failure can also be a little tricky since your interviewer might not agree with you, so I wish the article gave more advice on that. Another trap that one can very easily fall into is to avoid spending too much time setting the stage for the story(I might've done that). Ultimately, the purpose behind this question is to see how you handle failure. This article definitely better prepares me for the failure question if it comes up in the future.
Getting a question about your failures in an interview is definitely the hardest question. I recently received this question and was very caught off guard because I did not think about them asking this question before I went into my interview. I took a little time to think about what I could talk about and had a very hard time. I ended up telling a story that did not really apply to a failure or hard situation in theatre that I found the solution to. I talked about a time that I got hurt by a set piece but continued to push through and stage manage the show with a concussion. This answer was definitely a bad story to tell because it was not a problem that I fixed. I tried to save a set piece by putting myself under it but it was a lot heavier than me so it fell on me and I got hurt. That is not really fixing a situation.
This is defiantly an article that I can relate too. This past Monday I had to partake in a mock interview and I got asked this very question on two occasions. In my case it was always more difficult to say how I was going to fix the problem. Its great to say that you struggled or struggled in a certain area, but the question that always follows is how you fixed it. I also fell into the trap of saying a failure that probably should have been left unsaid. You can tell when the person sitting across from you isn’t satisfied with the answer; this basically turns me into a nervous wreck. This article does a great job of laying out the steps in a cohesive way that I can relate to. I really enjoyed reading the article and it is always helpful to read pointers about interviews because my days of them are far from over. Unless you are like some people that claim you will get jobs not from you resume but from the people you know, as far as I’m concerned, as long as I have a job I will have a smile on my face.
I am always a little conflicted about whether I love this question or hate it, and I think that it is because it really can make or break an interview. I am not sure whether I see it as an opportunity or as something to fear. This past Monday we had to do mock interviews as part of our PTM class and I got asked this question in one of my two interviews, and I do think that I answered it relatively well, but I am still a little unsure about what the answer to that question really does for an interviewer. I think the goal is to see how you talk about your failures, and how you have improved since then, but I feel like you get the same answer out of a person when you ask them about a time they faced a challenge and how they fixed. With that question you learn about how people problem solve, not how they failed. I think as I move on through my career I may have a greater understanding for the value of that question, but as of now I think that there are more things to help the interviewer see who the person really is and how they work, instead of how they fail.
I think that this article is really helpful to me. As many commenters have said, we had mock interviews in PTM this past week, and I got asked this question, of which I wasn’t really ready for. Though I have received this question and thought about an apt answer, I feel like this has always been a tough question to answer. I think that it is great how the article lists out how to answer it in steps. It makes it easier for me to think in my head and organize a better answer. I think the point that I have missed on in previous interviews is providing my own definition of failure. I feel like this can be a vital step in making my answer seem complete, sincere, and organized, which I feel it hasn’t been as much in the past. I will make sure to keep this article in mind in future interviews!
I often leave articles like this one with a sense of wasted time and the knowledge that I just read a four page article telling me to use common sense. I didn’t feel this way with this article however, it actually broke down the question in a way that could provide a unique insight into what a good failure story might be for me and how the best way to tell it could take form. It is helpful to me to just think about this question every once in a while even if I’m not practicing for an interview because it helps me reflect on more recent failures and how I could have learned to avoid those from failures even farther in the past. In addition to preparing me for interviews it might even help me on projects I’m working on right now so I can sweep right into a successful story for the next question.
My approach to answering this question has always been to draw from a handful of failures that I remember well that were significant enough to be meaningful but in the long run were more funny than catastrophic. Possibly because of that I actually like answering this question. I don’t mind talking about my failures in this context and I would imagine its information that interviews would find useful. I’m actually surprised that the article said this wasn’t one of the more common interview questions, I would have thought it would be, if only because a lot of what I was taught to be prepared for in interviews before I came to CMU involved answering questions like this. I’d certainly rather answer this question than talk about my strengths and weaknesses or what I can offer to a company. Those answers always feel more forced and artificial, as if they exist only in the world of the interview.
Ah, the inevitable “failure” question. The author here advocates for a balance in one’s answer, something that I think many people might not do in the heat of the moment. It’s easy to either fake it and tell the interviewer a failure that wasn’t really a failure, or pick the worst failure one’s ever had and tell the whole thing with no reservations. Either way, that answer isn’t helping anyone. By giving the interviewer a balanced answer and telling them how you learned from the failure, I think it’s very possible to impress the interviewer. I like the idea of first laying out how one sees failure. I think that tells the interviewer that the interviewee knows their standards of work and holds themselves accountable to those standards. Furthermore, it offers the interviewer a bit of time to think if they haven’t prepared their answer beforehand (or maybe they want to tweak their answer according to the flow of the interview thusfar). This is a really helpful and simple guide to answering one of the tougher interview questions.
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