How to answer ‘Tell me about a time you failed’ in a job interview

Earlier this week, we covered how to answer a typical job interview question: “How do you define success?” With commencement season continuing and the feeling of fresh potential in the air, we’re going to continue with our job interview series today. But this time, we’ll tackle a different, and perhaps more challenging, query: “Tell me about a time that you failed.”

When an interviewer poses this question, it’s not necessarily unexpected, but it’s a curveball nonetheless. You’ve spent the last few weeks (or months) preparing for your job search by digging into all of your previous successes, building up your confidence by highlighting your major accomplishments in résumés and cover letters. Now, it’s time to talk about failure—what a buzzkill, right?

But as senior contributor Tracy Brower writes in her recent story for Forbes, how you answer this question will tell your potential employer a lot about who you are and how you react to challenges. We’re all going to have bad days, or projects that don’t turn out the way we expect, and a good manager wants to have workers they know can learn from mistakes and bounce back after a rough patch.

In her story, Brower outlines the many forms this question can take, but no matter how you’re asked—whether it’s “How do you handle failure?” or “Describe a time when you had to pivot”—there are four things that an interviewer wants to hear in your answer:

1. How you handle failure: Answer in a way that shows you are self-aware and can be honest with yourself, without being overly negative. Can you keep your cool in tough situations? Make sure to outline how.
2. How you learn from failure: Be prepared with examples of how you’ve adjusted your approach, and how that helped you improve your work.
3. Whether you’re resilient: Sometimes you lose a client or miss a major goal, and that can hurt. But even the most successful people in the world have missed the mark a few times, and history will remember how they bounced back.
4. Whether you’re a team player: Do not play the blame game. Avoid throwing other team members or your previous employer under the bus. Instead, own up to your responsibility in a past failure, and leave others out of it.

Preparation for standard interview questions is an important part of landing your next job. Take the time to outline how your failures have made you a stronger worker, and you will be ready to ace one of the trickier questions an interviewer can ask.

Read the full story: Answering ‘tell me about a time you failed’ in a job interview

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Mental health awareness: As workplace anxiety rises, what managers can do to assist their employees

We’re halfway through the month of May, so it’s a good time to pause and recognize that it’s also National Mental Health Awareness Month. In his recent story for Forbes, senior contributor Jack Kelly writes about how this month “creates the opportunity for organizations to bring mental, emotional and physical well-being to the forefront.”

Anxiety in the workplace has surged in recent years, with mental health provider ComPsych finding that nearly a quarter of people who reached out for mental health assistance last year did so to help cope with anxiety.?

“For business leaders, there is an imperative to help employees cope with these feelings,” says Dr. Richard A. Chaifetz, founder, CEO and chairman of ComPsych. “Companies who invest in resources for employees ultimately benefit by attracting and retaining a healthier and more productive workforce.”

Read the full story for insight into what managers can do to promote mental health awareness and assist their teams.

Read the full story: An employer’s guide to mental health awareness in the workplace

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Thank you for reading! We'll be back next week with another edition of Forbes Edge. If you missed Tuesday’s newsletter, check it out here for advice on how to answer how you define success in a job interview.

This edition of Forbes Edge was curated by associate editor Chris Dobstaff.