What is your greatest failure in life best answer?
I was responsible for interacting with big clients and understanding the requirements. Being a fresher, I did not pay much attention to the details of the project. Instead, I focused only on my ethics and discipline. My poor listening skills led me to lose one of the most significant projects of the organization.
- Receiving poor or failing test grades.
- Not getting accepted into a degree or certification program.
- Interviewing for a position but not securing a job offer.
- Getting a bad performance review.
- Missing a deadline.
- Not making a team.
- Losing a client, sale, project or money.
Explain what happened clearly and quickly. Take responsibility and don't make excuses for the failure. Show what you learned from the experience. Talk about how you've used the experience to become better at your job and avoid similar mistakes.
Failing an assignment. Not getting a job. Not getting into a club or making a team. Losing a customer.
Interviewers ask questions like what is your greatest failure or tell me about a time you failed, to see how the candidate faces tough situations, and what they learned from the outcome. The interviewer is not interested in the actual failure itself, rather how you took it and implemented the lessons learned from it.
Henry Ford's first two automobile companies failed. Oprah Winfrey was fired from an early job as a television news anchor. Jerry Seinfeld was booed off stage in his first stand-up comedy appearance. Sir James Dyson suffered through 5,126 failed prototypes before he landed on the first working Dyson vacuum.
- Preventable failure: a failure caused by deviating from a known process. ...
- Complex failure: a failure caused by a system breakdown. ...
- Intelligent failure: a failure caused by an unsuccessful trial.
Choose a specific failure
Pick a real failure that happened in the workplace, specifically a failure related to the work you're doing now. Look for a story where something didn't go as planned. Choosing the right story is important, as you want to explain a situation where only one thing went wrong.
In materials science, fatigue – the weakening of a material caused by cyclic loading resulting in progressive, brittle, localized structural damage – is the most common failure mode and the one that generally produces other types of failure.
For example: Three years ago, we were doing A, but realized the result fell short of the goal. Things were just not working. Many saw it as a failure, but we also saw it as an opportunity to improve, so we did a thorough analysis and realized that B was a better tactic.
What is your biggest regret or failure?
Here is a list of “biggest regrets” many people have: being less assertive, breaking up, carelessly choosing one's life partner, choosing work over family, comparing oneself with others, dreaming more than acting on things, engrossing in anger, giving high importance to possessions, lacking self-confidence, lingering ...