Tell me about a time you made a mistake that was a great learning opportunity.
Instead of focusing on your mistake, talk about how you learned from it and adapted your behavior and approach to similar situations. Making mistakes is inevitable, and the most impactful learning often comes after failure. Describe how you learned a lesson after making a mistake in your past.
The interviewer is eager to see if you can admit to faults and make meaning out of failure. Mistakes and mix-ups are bound to happen; they don't expect you to have a perfect past. Share a minor mistake you made, either in your academic or professional past, and share what you learned from the experience.
"In college, I was enrolled in a course that I knew was going to be very easy because it aligned with my interests, and I already had prior knowledge on the subject. I decided to read the syllabus and do all of the large assignments within one week to get them out of the way so I could focus on other classes down the road as they got more challenging. I rushed into the assignments with far too much confidence and had to redo two of them because I didn't read the directions closely enough. I learned to slow down, make sure I truly understand something before jumping in, and ask for feedback to ensure I'm on the right track."
Community answers are written by other candidates practicing this set. Reading how others frame the same question is one of the fastest ways to sharpen your own.
Anonymous Answer
When I was working at Forth Capital I was in charge of sending quarterly valuations. When I first started with them, their system had not been updated for years and it was a complex manual task with a lot of repetition. We had to attach fund performance information and after a long day of this repetitive task, I noticed I had sent an old fund performance result that was no longer relevant. Luckily I always looked immediately at the 'sent' box to check it had gone. I immediately noticed my error and recalled the emails (it had only been sent to three clients and two were successful recalls'). I informed the adviser and contacted the third client to request that the email be deleted. From this mistake, I learned the importance of taking my time and taking short occasional breaks to ensure concentration remains at its full. I also suggested a new system whereby we purchased new inexpensive software enabling us to send attachments with a mail merge (which is not a possibility on the basic word mail merge). This saved 2 and a half days a week for future quarterly valuations.
Marcie's Feedback
Nice! Your example shows that you're thorough, detail-oriented, honest, and open to learning from your mistakes, all of which are great qualities to possess. You provide plenty of details about what happened, what the end result was, and what you learned. Your example does beg the question - was there a way to improve this entire process so it wasn't so repetitive and complicated? Did you suggest a way to improve it or did the company overhaul this procedure at some point? You might talk briefly about this as well, particularly if you had a hand in re-working the process itself so this mistake didn't happen again to someone else in the future. Great job!
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