When you go into a job interview, you typically come prepared to talk about your qualifications for the role — not your most embarrassing mistakes. Whether you like it or not, though, there’s a good chance you’ll be asked to share a story about a time you failed.
Hiring managers ask this not to shame you, but because they want to know how you react in those situations — and more importantly, how you learn and grow from them.
How to Answer ‘Tell Me About a Time You Failed’
- Pick a real but low-stakes example of a mistake you made.
- Describe the situation and how it was resolved.
- Take responsibility for the failure.
- Share what you learned and how you’ve improved as a result.
To prepare for this question, take some time to reflect on your past experiences, what you have learned and how that experience has sharpened your professional skills.
Why Interviewers Ask About a Time You Failed
1. To See How You Handle Adversity
When things go wrong, you have to be able to think on your feet and figure out a path forward. In asking this question, hiring managers want to see whether you can remain resilient under pressure.
“Companies need team members who can pivot and keep moving forward,” Brianna Rooney, CEO of recruiting firm TalentPerch, told Built In. “Business priorities change constantly, and there can’t be downtime to rally the team.”
2. To Gauge Your Self-Awareness
This question reveals whether you have enough self-awareness to recognize what went wrong and what you could have done differently. If you deflect responsibility and make excuses, this may signal to hiring managers that you will do the same in their organization.
“When a leader is hiring someone, they want their job to be easier. They want to know that this person can handle it,” Angela Tait, owner of HR consulting and recruiting firm Tait Consulting, told Built In. “If you have a person that’s talking about all the reasons it went wrong and playing the blame game, they’re not going to want to bring that person onto their team.”
3. To Assess Your Capacity for Growth
Failure can be a powerful teaching moment, but only for those who are willing to learn and grow from it. Hiring managers want to know if you look for opportunities to evolve as a professional, which is a crucial mindset for learning new technologies and adapting to market conditions.
“Nobody gets out of bed and thinks they are going to go to work and do something stupid,” career coach Sharon Rose Hayward told Built In. “People make mistakes because they didn’t have all the information, didn’t have enough time or needed additional training. Learning from these situations is how we get better.”
How to Respond to ‘Tell Me About a Time You Failed’
1. Pick a Low-Stakes Mistake
Don’t try to dodge the question by talking about how you handle failure in general, or how you once made a trivial mistake like using the wrong time zone on a calendar invite. At the same time, avoid describing epic failures that reflect poorly on your professional abilities.
Instead, choose a real example with relatively low consequences that highlights a valuable lesson you learned. Maybe your chosen strategy didn’t pan out, you missed a deadline or a product launch had a rocky rollout. In some cases, it could be a potential failure that was remedied before things went wrong.
“Begin by thinking about times in your professional life when you had to rely on your problem-solving skills to rectify a mistake you made,” Heather O’Neill, a career advice expert at Resume Now, told Built In. “Then, think about the ways you adapted your behavior to avoid making the same mistake in the future.”
Example: “I undertook an ambitious project that required several skills I didn’t have. I overestimated my ability to learn on the fly, so I had to ask several coworkers to help.”
2. Take Responsibility for the Failure
Hiring managers want to see that you have the self-awareness to recognize what you did wrong. Don’t blame other people, and try not to make excuses about tight timeframes, lack of resources or other factors beyond your control.
“It shows them how you are going to work on a team,” Tom Dowd, owner of Dowd Career Counseling, told Built In. “When something goes wrong, are you going to blame other people, or are you going to say, ‘Hey, this was my part in it. What are we learning from this? How are we moving forward?’”
If you were working on a team, take ownership for the role you played in the mistake. “It’s a very fine line … but you don’t want to say ‘we’ the whole time,” Dowd said. “Call out what your role was and what you would do differently.”
Example: “The project came off as disjointed because we had different visions of what we were trying to achieve. As the marketing representative on the project, I should have assumed more of a leadership role by touching base with each department and communicating what their piece of the project should entail.”
3. Focus on the Solution More Than the Failure
Provide the interviewer with the specifics of the situation, but avoid long-winded explanations in an attempt to justify why you made the mistake. Keep the explanation of the failure as concise as possible, and then pivot relatively quickly to talking about how you resolved the situation and what you took away from it.
“The story isn’t just about the failure,” Dowd said. “The story is about what you did next.”
Example: “A client was dissatisfied because our proposal was not as comprehensive as they expected. I should have done a better job of managing the client’s expectations and clarifying the scope of our firm’s expertise. Now, I always clarify our firm’s expertise in our initial consultation, and I recommend other firms that can help with other services. By managing client expectations upfront, we have seen a 30 percent increase in satisfaction ratings.”
4. Describe How You Resolved the Situation
Talk about how you addressed the mistake. If you were able to course-correct and avoid further damage, this will show your ability to solve problems, adapt to changing variables and think on your feet. If you were not able to rectify the situation, you should talk about what you did in the aftermath of the mistake. Maybe you apologized to a client or you held a post-mortem meeting to discuss what went wrong.
Example: “After huddling as a team, we decided to take a different approach. Our new strategy was successful, and we were able to deliver the project on time and under budget.”
5. Focus On What You Learned
The most important part of your answer is what you learned from the mistake. The failure should be framed as a learning experience that helped you grow as a professional. This shows that you are always evolving, which is a critical skill in today’s business world.
“Most people fear failure, but failing is the fastest way to learn,” Rooney said. “Having constant learners on the team ensures continuous improvement and adaptability.”
If you really want to impress the hiring manager, you should give examples of how you applied this lesson to subsequent situations in your professional career.
Example: “From that experience, I learned that people have different learning styles. As a result, I always try to provide a visual component along with written and verbal instructions. For example, I recently created a video series to show our interns how we carry out each task of the design process. It has been helpful not just for interns, but for answering questions that other teams might have about our workflow and processes.”
6. Prepare Your Answer Using the STAR Method
Don’t get caught off guard by this question. To structure your response, use the STAR method. Then, rehearse it until it feels natural.
- Situation: Briefly describe the context of the situation.
- Task: Explain your role and responsibilities in that situation.
- Action: Describe the actions you took to address the situation.
- Result: Discuss the results of your actions and what you learned from the situation.
Example Answers for ‘Tell Me About a Time You Failed’
A marketing director switches strategies after their initial approach failed to gain traction.
In my last role, my marketing team was tasked with generating buzz and excitement about a new edition of our flagship product. As the marketing director, I was responsible for spearheading the campaign and generating 10,000 presale orders.
We launched a paid social media campaign that generated a decent amount of impressions, but after several weeks yielded only 3,000 presale orders. After further analysis, we realized that many of the social media users were unfamiliar with our product, so our messaging about the updated features meant very little to them. With just a month left to go, we decided to take a more direct approach and launch an email campaign targeted at customers who had previously purchased earlier versions of the product.
Our revised approach was much more effective, and we managed to meet our presale goal in time for the product launch. After the product launch, I gathered the team to discuss what went wrong, and we agreed that we hadn’t fully thought through the buyer persona for the product and the most direct way to reach them. After that campaign, we put stringent market research processes into place and required A/B testing before fully committing to future strategies. These two processes led us to surpass our presale goal by 20 percent on the next project and 35 percent on the project after that.
A project manager missed a major deadline after the team ran into some unexpected delays.
In my last role, our team was expected to launch a new software feature within a three-month time period. Unfortunately, the engineering team encountered a technical issue that took longer than expected to resolve.
As the project manager, I was responsible for making sure the feature was delivered on time and within budget. I was in regular communication with the team during this time, but their estimated completion dates kept getting pushed back as new issues emerged. What I initially thought would be a small setback turned into a more significant issue that caused us to miss our deadline by a week. I now know that I should have provided earlier notice to our stakeholders to discuss an alternate launch date or request more engineering resources to assist on the project.
After the project was completed, I met with the team to talk about what went wrong, and we agreed that we will do a better job of assessing potential setbacks before setting a launch date. I have also made a habit of providing daily updates to all stakeholders and developing contingency plans when issues pop up. These measures have prevented similar issues on numerous other projects, and I’m happy to say that I haven’t missed a deadline since.
A magazine editor has to hire event planners at the last minute after nearly bungling an awards banquet.
Three years ago, I failed at organizing an event because I was too stubborn to ask for help. I was the editor of a small monthly magazine, and we had just published our first “Best in the City” series that asked readers to vote for their favorite small business in 10 different categories. The series was a hit, and I wanted to keep up the momentum with an awards banquet for the winners.
I decided to organize the event myself because I didn’t want to create extra work for our small publishing team. “How hard could it be,” I thought. I booked a venue, sent out invitations and publicized it in our magazine. As the event grew closer, though, I realized I hadn’t considered decorations, entertainment or the awards I was supposedly handing out.
After two months in denial, I had to call in an event planning firm to handle all of the arrangements I failed to consider. On the day of the event, I received so many compliments from the attendees — almost all of which were considerations I never would have thought about. I was so grateful to the event firm, even though they charged me emergency rates.
That experience taught me to recognize when I’m in over my head and to seek out help from people who have the experience that I lack. For example, when we decided to launch an Instagram page, I hired a social media firm to set up the page and teach us about best practices for growing our audience. They taught us so much we didn’t know about, and it is now our second-biggest traffic driver after Facebook.
A missed deadline teaches a team lead to keep clients abreast of any hiccups in the production schedule.
Early in my career, I worked on a project that was experiencing unexpected delays. I was optimistic that we could turn things around in time before the deadline, but I was wrong. I was the team lead on the project, and I was in charge of communicating with the client and delivering the project on time. A couple days before the deadline, I had to tell the client that we still had about a week’s worth of work ahead of us.
The client was understandably angry, as they had to reschedule a marketing campaign due to our postponed launch. This experience taught me that I should have communicated with the client early on so they were not caught off-guard so close to the deadline.
In a more recent example from last year, I remembered this situation when our team encountered an issue that was slowing our productivity. This time, I reached out to the client to let them know there was a possibility of us falling behind schedule. The client not only appreciated the advance notice of the issue but was also able to provide us with information that helped us solve the issue. We were able to finish that project on time, and because of my honesty, develop trust with the client.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you respond to tell me about a time you failed?
Think of a situation that offered a teachable moment but didn’t have a disastrous outcome. As you tell the story, you should take responsibility for your role in the failure, and you should emphasize what actions you took to address the situation or prevent it from happening again in the future. The STAR method can be useful in structuring your answer.
What is a good example of failure for an interview?
A good example of a failure is a situation in which you learned a valuable lesson that you have been able to apply to subsequent situations in the future. If you recognized that your business strategy was not working, you may have learned to collect more client feedback or market research in the future.
