How to Answer: Tell Me About a Time You Failed

You bought the perfect professional outfit and you shaped and refined your presentation skills so that you can articulately convey what a great candidate you are to your interviewer. You’re trying your hardest to put your best foot forward. Then comes the prompt that could cause everything to come crashing down:

“Tell me about a time you failed.”

This prompt is tricky, but it’s not meant to trick you. You know that no one is perfect–that everyone has failed at some point in his or her life, especially in the workplace. Regardless, you didn’t envision your interview as the forum to uncover those hidden skeletons. Best foot forward, remember?

Well, answering the “Tell me about a time you failed.” prompt is a surprisingly great way to show off a quality every employer wants to see in a candidate: your ability to learn and bounce back from your mistakes. Instead of focusing on the negatives of your error, talk about what you learned, and describe how your mistake changed you for the better. Maybe you ended up with a lower GPA one semester because you spent too much time procrastinating, so you started dedicating a few hours every day – phone off, noise cancellation headphones on – to finishing up your projects.

An even richer answer will show how you were able to convince the person you let down — your manager, your professor, a teammate or classmate — to trust you again.  “It’s easy to make mistakes, but it’s hard to recover really well in a memorable, impactful way,” says Allison Stadd, Sr. Marketing  & Communications Manager at Shake Shack. While interning as a magazine fact-checker during college, Allison made a mistake that cost the publication a lawsuit; instead of letting it define her, Allison leveraged the opportunity to make an impression of how she dealt with it. For the rest of her internship, she came in early and stayed late, putting extra time into developing a laser-focused attention to detail. To this day, she’s still close to her former boss.

So, when you’re confronted with this prompt in your interview, make sure you:

Start with a real mistake you made. Your response should be a lot like your answer to the “What’s Your Greatest Weakness?” question in that you should be honest and genuine about your shortcomings. At the same time, the mistake you mention should be a mistake you were able to fix and recover from so that you can easily put a positive spin on your answer.

Talk about what you learned. Each mistake you make helps you to identify a potential weakness and highlighting your own areas for improvement will show your interviewer that you’re self-aware (a huge plus).

Outline the steps you took to make things right. How did you prioritize the development of your skills/behavior to ensure that you would never make the same mistake again? If your boss or professor noticed an improvement in you, mention that as well to show that your determination made an impression.

Talking about your failures isn’t easy when you’re trying to impress your interviewer, but the way you frame your answer to this question can help you realize that your mistakes are learning experiences–learning experiences that can contribute to the development of your greatest strengths!