How To Answer “Tell Me About A Time You Failed” (With Examples): Job Interview Question

We understand if your heart jumped a little bit even reading that sentence.

This common interview question is a job interviewer’s bread and butter, as it’s a chance for them to learn a lot about you in many different ways at once — from the story you choose to tell to how much responsibility you take on yourself for the mistake.

In this article we will go over how to answer this question, give example answers, and common mistakes to avoid.

Key Takeaways:

• Be honest with the interviewer about your mistake.

• Make sure you prepare you answer ahead of time. You don’t want to look like a deer in headlights when you’re asked this question.

• Talk about how you have grown and what you have done to fiz the mistake.

Why Interviewers Ask “Tell Me About a Time You Failed”

It’s a behavioral interview question, which means the interviewer wants to see how the interviewee performed in a past situation. In this case, an unpleasant situation where you messed up.

Talking about one of your work-related failures can give a hiring manager a lot of insight into what kind of employee you might turn out to be. But it’s a lot harder than other common interview questions like “tell me about yourself.”

Are you the kind of person who rises to the occasion and continually finds ways to grow?

Or are you the kind of person who repeats their own history, who over and over again manages to screw up in the same ways every time?

Having to tell a person you’re actively trying to impress about a time when you made a huge mistake can be daunting, but fortunately, we’ve got some tips to help make your interviewing experience a little easier.

When it comes to talking about a failure of yours to a potential employer, the fear can be palpable. Which do you choose? How do you frame it to make yourself look good without seeming dishonest?

How to Answer “Tell Me About a Time You Failed”

Usually, the answer people give to this question is more of an extended humblebrag.

An example of this would be if someone said that their biggest failure was that they “work too hard,” or “care too much,” or some other similar nonsense.

Even when a person has a good story to go along with the answer, it’s usually pretty obvious that the person is actually using the opportunity to brag about themselves rather than using it to actually engage with the question.

So step 1 is to make sure that the failure you’re talking about is, you know, actually a failure. You have to actually have messed up in order to convince your interviewer that you went on to learn anything significant from the experience.

1. Be honest. It’s important to choose a real failure for your story, and for you to own up to that failure. Giving someone an honest portrayal of a time that you made a mistake at work means nothing if you end it with “…but it wasn’t really my fault, anyway.”

   This goes beyond the obvious dishonesty of making up an answer out of whole cloth, which by itself would be a pretty obvious ploy (unless you’re a very good liar). The biggest mistake people make with this answer isn’t that they lie outright about their biggest failure, but instead it’s that they choose an answer that isn’t really a failure at all.

2. Show that you learned from your mistake. You’ll want to demonstrate how you learned from this failure and what you did to help resolve it. A hiring manager wants to see how you handled it and how it affected the outcome.

3. Think ahead to the ending. What has the hiring manager learned about you from you telling about this experience? Did they learn that you know how to accept and move on from mistakes, or that you have some serious character flaws that might prevent you from being a good job candidate?

4. Use the STAR method. STAR is (situation, task, action, result) to give your answer a coherent narrative that’s easy to follow. In fact, the STAR method works for all behavioral interview questions.

Example Answers to “Tell Me About a Time You Failed”

Remember our tips, and you’ll have no problem answering this behavioral interview question. Just to bring it all together, let’s look at some example answers to finalize your interview preparation.

1. “When I started my first internship, I was overly eager to go the extra mile. So much so that I agreed to take on unrealistic deadlines with coworkers. I was late completing at least one task each week, and my coworkers were not happy with me. After that experience, I devised a tracking system to make sure I knew how long each task would realistically take, and made sure never to fall behind again. I understand now that it’s better to give a longer timeline and be early than promise the moon and fail to deliver.”

   Why it works: This answer works well because he owns up to his mistake and shows awareness that it was negatively affecting his coworkers. It’s always good when you can show that you see yourself from other peoples’ perspectives. He also shows how he grew from the experience and turned this weakness into an organizational strength.

2. “The biggest mistake that I made at my last job as a warehouse foreman involved a duplicate order that went out. There had been an issue with the new software that the corporate office installed, but I failed to follow the proper protocol that would have caught this mistake. Luckily, the client was very understanding, but I now keep a checklist for each and every order to ensure consistency.”

   Why it works: Notice that she brings up that a software error contributed to the mistake without trying to completely exonerate herself. She owns up to her part in the error. Also, she’s not complacent just because the client wasn’t upset; that shows that she holds herself to a high standard in all her work.

Say our example is missing meetings. If the ending to that story is just “and I got fired” or “and no one found out,” then it might not do much to convince your hiring manager or recruiter that you changed.

But let’s say instead that you actually had a talk with your boss. You told her about all the issues you’d been having; she forgave you, and together you had a discussion about what needed to be done to ensure that something like this never happened again. Then, to follow this up, you talk about how you never missed a meeting again, and what strategies you employed to ensure this.

That’s a good failure story — it shows you taking a bad situation that was your fault, taking responsibility for said failure, making a plan to address the failure, and then following through on that plan.

That’s what employers want to see. Not someone who never makes mistakes, but someone who is adept at learning and growing from them, and capable of articulating that growth to others.

Tips for Answering “Tell Me About a Time You Failed”

Behavioral interview questions like this are all about the future, not the past. Sure, you need to own up to your weaknesses. And then you do need to, you know, actually mention how you’ve grown and built strengths off the experience.

• Focus on how you moved forward. This is the most important part of the story you’re telling — how, after having failed or made some kind of major mistake, you were able to grow and change as both a person and an employee. While managers would prefer that all their employees be perfect all the time, they know that realistically the people under them are going to screw up on occasion. They can forgive that.

  What they can’t forgive, however, is someone who makes the same mistakes over and over again. A person who can’t learn from their mistakes is not a good employee. Speaking of red flags as we were a moment ago, this is pretty much the biggest. Basically, your story needs a happy ending.

• Bring up extenuating factors Maybe part of the reason why you missed so many meetings was that your dog had become sick recently and you were spending extra time taking care of her. That’s a good thing to mention, and it helps to humanize some of your decision-making.

  But you still need to bring it back to the problem at hand — in this case, that you were missing meetings, and you hadn’t yet spoken to your boss about the reasons why. Whatever the extenuating factors, your productivity was suffering and you were missing work responsibilities. In the telling of your story, these things still need to be your fault, so that you can go on to recover from them and grow at the end of the story.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Answering “Tell Me About a Time You Failed”

• Putting blame on others. To repeat ourselves one last time, this is a story about why you failed. The tendency to try to excuse yourself from blame is a natural impulse, but if it wasn’t your fault, then you didn’t really fail — you were just a victim of circumstance. In which case, the whole story you just told has absolutely no bearing on the question you were asked.

• Bringing up failures involving a crime.

  There are a lot of mistakes a person can make while they’re on the job. As long as a person learns from them, it’s usually okay, but there are certain scenarios in which a mistake is so colossal that it doesn’t really matter whether or not you learned anything from it.

  Don’t bring up that particular story. That might seem like an extreme case, but it’s happened before. But even less extreme examples, like talking about how you missed three weeks’ worth of meetings before getting fired, can still set off a lot of red flags.

• Claiming you haven’t failed at anything. Hiring managers will question your honesty. They will also think you might be pushing the blame on others and not taking any blame. Everyone fails at something at one point or another, we are only human after all.

Expert Opinion

Final Thoughts

So now you’ve got the general idea of it. Talking about your mistakes is easy, but not always advisable. But talking about the right mistakes, and going on to talk about how you’ve grown and implemented changes to the way you work based on these mistakes — that’s how you’ll impress a hiring manager.

And that’s how I learned I should never suddenly raise pharmaceutical prices all at once. I’m a better person now. Now I raise them slowly over time, so no one notices they’re being overcharged.”

The question might be to talk about a time you failed, but that’s not quite true. What employers really want to know is how you went on to succeed in the face of a previous failure.

After all, everyone loves an underdog story.

Author

Ryan Morris

Ryan Morris was a writer for the Zippia Advice blog who tried to make the job process a little more entertaining for all those involved. He obtained his BA and Masters from Appalachian State University.