How to answer the job interview question, 'What is your biggest regret and why?'
“What is your biggest remorse and why?” is a common process interview question which can cause candidates to stumble. Don’t allow it throw you off of your recreation if it comes up in your subsequent interview—and don’t assume that you may get off the hook by saying, “I haven't any regrets.”
“While employers can be searching out the appropriate candidate, they’re now not looking for the right person,” says Chester Goad, an administrator at Tennessee Technological University who has served on hiring committees. Employers want to peer in case you blame others in your regrets, or in case you comply with an affordable, logical manner to analyze and circulate on from a mistake.
Plan beforehand for difficult questions related to screw ups and regrets in view that hiring managers often use those varieties of questions to get at your character. And when endeavoring to reply this query, make certain you’re professional and honest—it also doesn’t harm to say which you discovered some thing inside the method.
Take our advice if you need to address this query with out regretting your solution.
Choose a professional regret
When deciding on a remorse to share, it’s best to speak approximately one related to your job or profession. Sharing a non-public regret approximately a relationship or financial trouble may want to make the interviewer uncomfortable.
“The closing thing you want to do is derail the interview by means of speaking approximately the time you broke your sister’s piggy bank,” says Nick Fox, Newtown, Pennsylvania-primarily based profession coach at SuccessHacking.Com. “They need to understand approximately a remorse in an effort to form your capability to do the process at hand.”
You say: “A few years in the past, I became down a extraordinary task at XYZ Corporation that could have given me the experience I had to move my career forward faster.”
Describe clearly how you handled the remorse
Interviewers are looking for a candidate who's sincere and displays the capability to self-accurate and improve, not someone who has no regrets.
Which is all the extra cause to very own the remorse you’ve chosen to proportion, and be sincere about the way you treated it.
“Most employers aren’t going to remove a person from the pool for being sincere,” Goad says.
If you remorse turning down that superb job opportunity, inform the interviewer the way you overcame the error in the long run.
You say: “Rather than feeling sorry for myself due to the fact I grew to become down the XYZ task, I started out seeking out different opportunities that I knew may want to lead me to exceptional—possibly better—studying stories.”
Show the way it made you smarter
No remember the remorse you pick to speak about, recall to reveal you learned something valuable and didn’t make the equal mistake two times.
“Open up with a legitimate regret,” Fox says, “however then supply the story context by using acknowledging that it changed into just a checkpoint for your manner to get wherein you're currently at for your lifestyles.”
If you don’t pair your regret with some lesson discovered, you chance sounding like someone who could be awful for business, he adds. “An interviewer wants to listen which you simplest want to screw up once earlier than you’ll restoration it because that indicates a stage of self-focus that now not everyone have.”
You say: “I still remorse turning down the activity at XYZ, however, I got some great and unique experience somewhere else. And had I taken that process, I likely wouldn’t be sitting here mastering about this incredible possibility, now might I?”
