Job Interview Questions and Answers

Tag: career

  • What is the biggest failure you’ve had in your career?

    When you are interviewing for a job, no matter what type of job it happens to be, you can usually rely on the fact that the employer will be interested in finding out what you have accomplished in prior jobs as well as what you were not able to accomplish. This is a fairly common question and one that you should be prepared to answer because there is a good chance that it will be presented to you.

    Everyone has failed at something from time to time. The only difference is the severity of the failure or at least how severe you perceive the failure to be. Consequently, if you are asked this question you should not have any problems coming up with a relevant example to share, but you do need to take care regarding what you share and what you do not.

    The best way to respond to this type of question is to provide an example of a situation that is relatively minor but is one which you will be able to transfer into a positive. For example, you might say that at one point you were working in a particular job and were faced with a tight deadline. In that situation you found that you needed to adjust the workload in order to get everything back on track and complete the project on time and actually ahead of schedule. This clearly shows that you take important matters such as deadlines seriously and also that you are able to take a negative and turn it into a positive.

    When answering this question you should make sure that you never respond by describing any type of situation which you would consider to be a big failure. You certainly do not want to venture into any territory where you talk about being terminated from a position even if that is what actually happened. Unless you are directly asked about something like this by the interviewer, it is better to just leave such topics alone and not introduce them into the interview. Choosing a situation that is relatively minor and then showing you were able to turn it into a positive shows your dedication to the job and also demonstrates that you are able to take even bad situations and make something good out of them.

  • What made you follow the career path that you have chosen?

    The key to answering questions like this, questions that seek to determine your motivations, is to know the answers. The time to choose a career or to determine why you’ve chosen a career is long before the interview. Be prepared. That also helps you find a job that you can enjoy.

    In tough economic times, or for certain people and certain jobs, the answer may be a simple one. “I’ve chosen this career because it matches my skills.” Good communicators may choose sales or marketing, math geniuses may choose engineering, people good with their hands may choose carpentry. This is a perfectly good answer – it’s honest, and it shows a dedication to the job because it’s something you love, at least as far as work life is concerned.

    Make sure you understand the job requirements and know something about the company. Responding “I love solving problems on my own, without worrying about being bothered by people” doesn’t really work for a customer service job.

    Even if your job is jack of all trades, moving between industries as a contractor or consultant, you have a career. In this case it might be expressed as “I really enjoy the challenge of learning new things, meeting new people and solving new problems. I don’t like long routine. This job let’s me jump in, get the job done, then move on to the next one.”

    Other good answers include:

    Family Field:
    “My father did this, and his father before him did it. I was raised to work in this field. I don’t know any other kind of work, and more importantly this work satisfies me. I wouldn’t want to work in any other field.”

    Matches Skills:
    “I loved math as long as I can remember. I was always way ahead of my grade level in school. When someone told me I could earn a living with numbers, I couldn’t believe it. There are challenges all the time, something I really enjoy as a problem solver.”

    Tried Many Things:
    “My parents told me to try different things to see what I liked. After all, work is somewhere you spend most of your week, so it should be something you like. I tried all kinds of different jobs through my late teens and 20’s. I liked this the best, I’ve been motivated to work hard at it, so here I am.”

    There’s often a follow up question like “What steps have you taken to follow this career.” So be prepared to give concrete examples of where you’ve been, and where you’re going in the career.

    Leaving it to chance usually doesn’t cut it. “I wrote down a bunch of careers on a paper stuck to the wall. This is where the dart landed.”