Career Coach Reveals What Recruiters Really Want To Hear When They Ask About A Time You Failed
Learn the right way to answer this crucial question.
fizkes | Shutterstock Job interviews are notoriously stressful, even when you enter them fully prepared. It may soothe your nerves to realize that most interviews follow a specific pattern, as the purpose of an interview is to get a deeper understanding of your work style and what you would bring to the role.
A career coach named Cara has over 20 years of experience working in HR, career coaching, and recruiting. She recently gave her professional insight on how a particular question is designed to learn more about an interviewee.
The career coach revealed what recruiters really want to hear when they ask about a time you failed.
Like most interview topics, this question is meant to uncover different aspects of your professional personality, including how you manage conflict and difficult situations.
“The recruiter wants to hear a true failure,” Cara said. “Not a success veiled as a failure.”
She explained that recruiters want to know three things about a candidate, starting with their ability to take responsibility for their mistakes, as opposed to passing the blame off to coworkers or the larger system at play.
Recruiters ask about how you've failed because they want to know 'Your resilience to overcome obstacles and continue to problem solve.'
The ADP Research Institute conducted a study on resilience in the workplace, defining the concept as “The capacity of an individual to withstand, bounce back from, and work through challenging circumstances or events at work.”
The study found that there are three sources of workplace resilience: Oneself, one’s team leaders, and one’s senior leaders.
On an individual level, workplace resilience can be qualified by a sense of personal agency, someone’s ability to compartmentalize challenges, and the actual day-to-day work they’re doing.
People’s daily tasks can build up their sense of self and energy or deplete it. The study noted that when employees find their work meaningful, it can help them face challenges successfully because what they’re doing actually fills their cup.
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As far as one's team leaders, a specific tenant of relationships has a major impact on an individual’s workplace resilience: Trust.
Trusting one’s team leader and upper management is an essential element of being resilient on the job.
While resilience is a highly valuable trait to demonstrate, Cara also noted that recruiters also want to know about a person’s level of self-awareness and their ability to see mistakes as a growth point.
The career coach shared that the best format to answer a question on workplace failings is with the SOAR format.
The acronym SOAR stands for situation, obstacle, action, and result.
Cara advised job hunters to clearly describe the situation they were confronted with, what the obstacles were, how they acted, and what the final result was.
“Even if the result is something that you’ve learned, that you will put into place in the future,” she said.
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At their core, interviews are nerve-wracking, in part because sitting in the hot seat and answering questions about yourself is challenging for most people, especially when that question touches on a time when you didn’t present as the best version of yourself.
Yet it’s hugely important to remember that literally no person is perfect, and everyone confronts failure and mistakes at some point in their career. It’s how someone navigates that failure that shows whether they can learn from it and move onward and upward.
Alexandra Blogier is a writer on YourTango's news and entertainment team. She covers social issues, pop culture, and all things to do with the entertainment industry.