Hi folks. It's great to see you again. And if you are new to this channel, my name's Bill Benoist.
I'm a certified professional career coach here in Silicon Valley. And in today's video,
I want to talk about an interview question that a lot of people just simply fail to prepare for. So,
if you're in career transition or you're looking for a new job, I can't stress
enough how important it is to be prepared for the interview. And you need to be thinking about what
your answers are going to be for the question, “Tell me a little bit about yourself” or “What
happened at your last job?” “What are your salary expectations?” “What do you think your biggest
weakness is?” “Where do you want to be in five years?” “What do you think your strengths are?”
And, even the behavioral type of questions, like, “Tell me a time when, or Give me an example of.”
And by the way, if you are struggling with how to prepare yourself for these kind
of interview questions, I do have some free training on my website.
I'll put a link to it in the upper right-hand corner, as well as in the notes section below.
But there's one question that a lot of individuals just simply just don't think about preparing for
and it catches them off guard. And that is what is it, what was the mistake that you made
or could be asked, “Tell me about a failure that you had.” And I think it's, you know,
just a lot of people, they don't want to think about these kind of things. So,
they just don't even think about preparing for it, but it is a fairly common question
and one that you want to be ready for. So, here's how you prepare for it. First off,
you need to understand the format of the SOAR and the STAR story. So again, I go over this
in the training that I have on my website, 100% free, but essentially a STAR is your situation,
the task that was involved, or maybe your responsibility,
the action that you took and the results that came about that. Or, a SOAR is almost the same exact
thing. It's a situation, but instead of a task or a responsibility, the O stands for the obstacle
that you faced and then the “A” for the action you took and the “R” for the results. So, keep
this in mind when you're forming your story. So, when we're talking about a mistake,
the first thing I want you to understand is we're not talking about the biggest mistake
that you made. So you don't want, you don't necessarily, if you have a big mistake out there,
you don't necessarily need to share it that biggest mistake. All right. So this is where
this is where I think preparation is key because a lot of times, if you're not prepared for this
kind of interview question, that's probably the first thing that's gonna come to your mind,
or even worse. You can sit there, nothing's coming to your mind and you answer well, you know, Mr.
Hiring manager, I really can't think of a mistake that I've made over the course of my career.
That people, that hiring manager is just not
going to buy it. Because one of the things that they're looking for is awareness. Are
you aware of the work that you're producing? So there, I know everybody has made a mistake in,
in their career at some point or another. So, sit back, think about this,
but make sure that it's not the biggest mistake that you made or the biggest failure that you've
made. Well, you know, I opened up a, a, an email that was infected that went through all of the
social security numbers in our system, you know, stole everything to, uh, Russian hacker. No,
you don't want to go down that avenue, but I know that there are going to be some
mistakes or failures that you made that I think we can talk about. So, this is what you need to
think about, but then what you're gonna do is this is what this hiring manager is looking for.
So they're not necessarily looking for the, the actual content of the mistake itself,
but how did you handle it? And they're really looking at four different things here,
and this is what you need to meet. Number one, did you take ownership of this mistake,
or did you try to blame it on either someone else, another department, another colleague,
or a process you need to make sure that you're taking ownership of this mistake. So that's the
first thing that you want to keep in mind? The second thing is what was it? How did you recover
of this mistake? So, this is where again, the whole star or sore story comes in. You know,
you talk about the situation, you talked about the tasks, the responsibility, or the obstacle.
And now we're really talking about the action you took. How did you recover from this mistake?
And then the third element that they're looking for is what did you learn from this mistake?
Okay. You want it share what it was that you learned from, uh, what had happened.
And then the fourth element is what would you do differently the next time? So again, if you're
in career transition or you're, uh, looking for a new job out there, and you're preparing your
interview questions, make sure that you include this one this way. You're not caught up guard.
When you're asked, tell me about a mistake that you made. So, I know this was a short video this
week, but I hope you found it informative and useful. And if you haven't already done, so
make sure that you subscribe to this channel, hit the bell notification,
as I do upload new career tips and strategies every Tuesday. And I'd hate for you to miss
anything. Thanks for stopping by. And I look forward to seeing you next week, take care.