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Answers to Tough Interview Questions

In your current role what has been your major disappointment?

You have to be prepared to talk about some things that didn't go so well. The key here is to show what you learnt from the situation and how you would handle a similar situation better in the future.

Nobody's perfect. Don't lose confidence in answering this one. Lay your disappointment out quite openly. They're looking for honesty - and your attitude to risk. This is a question from an experienced interviewer. They've used the word 'disappointment' and that's very helpful. In your answer you should stick with that sort of word and avoid words like 'failure' or 'loss'.

I CANNOT TELL A LIE, IT WAS I WHO CUT DOWN THE TREE

Like George Washington you mustn't duck responsibility for the disappointment, even if you've got a cast iron excuse that what went wrong wasn't your fault. It's a bad worker who blames their tools, and a poor salesperson who blames the product or the company or anything else for not delivering the goods.

'I was disappointed when the effort we put into the big Bradford sales campaign didn't result in any more business than we were doing beforehand. We knew at the time that it was a risky use of our resources; but the reward we were shooting for seemed worth it and I really wanted to have a go. The team was raring to go as well. In terms of risk, the upside was huge and the downside disappointing, as opposed to disastrous - we were already pretty much on the annual target and any gain would have been the icing on the cake.'

'OK, so what went wrong?' Time to spill the beans using words like 'underestimated' or 'miscalculated'. Emphasise that it's much easier to know what should have been done after the event: 'With the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight, I probably misunderstood how important a client they were to the competition. I mean, no one likes losing business; but they poured effort and resource into keeping their share of the market. They lowered their price more than we had expected. In my preparation I'd warned the company what discount we would have to offer to get the business. If I'd done the calculation on an even bigger discount, I might have seen the campaign was not worth the effort.'

IT WON'T HAPPEN AGAIN

Move on now to what you've learnt from the situation; try to get in first rather than waiting for the question, 'So, what would you do differently next time?' Start with a process change that you would make and then something to do with people:

'The first thing I would do going into such a situation again would be to sit down with the customer and ask some hard questions about whether they are willing to consider changing their supplier. I'd get the project manager to proclaim this willingness in front of two senior managers, one from their company and one from mine. That ought to help with commitment. The other thing I'd do is keep the team gung-ho about tackling the opportunity, but somehow warn them that there has to be a risk that it won't all go exactly as we would like. That way it would be less of a challenge to pick them up again after the event.'

Now, if you can add an insight for the whole company to learn from your experience, you've turned a potential snake into a good long ladder: 'I also think we might coordinate our resources when trying a big competitive battle like this. It would have been great if we'd looked as though we were threatening some other competitive accounts in the same area at the same time. That way the competition wouldn't have been able to concentrate so much resource against us.'


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